Pickled Cranberries

It’s always this time of year that my inner chipmunk starts getting restless- the last of the local produce has all but disappeared, and the chipmunk part of me starts frantically looking for things it can store away for the winter. I know this is silly. Unless the apocalypse shows up I’ll have no problem finding food through the winter, but it’s still an instinctual urge I have to indulge.

So, for the first time ever, I am attempting canning. My mother used to can tomatoes every year, usually enough to last much further than through the winter, and I vaguely remember helping her, the general process of sterilizing jars and filling them with goopy tomato sauces, then reboiling the filled jars. But I’d never attempted the full process myself until now, so I figured I’d better read up on the details. Following a mix of instructions from several different recipes, I decided to pickle cranberries. I filled each jar with fresh cranberries, then poured a boiling mixture of vinegar, water, brown sugar, sage, and orange zest over top. Out of eight jars, seven of them gave the correct “ping” noise as they cooled after the second boiling, showing that they sealed correctly. The eighth is in the fridge, waiting to be tested in a few days. I expect the pickled cranberries to come out much like an unsweetened cranberry sauce, and am looking forward to trying it on turkey sandwiches, cheese platters, and in other sauces. The one problem with pickling, especially for the impatient inner chipmunk, is that you must wait at least a couple days to see how it turned out: if I got something horribly wrong, the entire batch will be rather worthless, and I’ll have to start the entire process over. If they turn out well, half of my shiny little jars will be sent out to family as a small consolation for my absence this Thanksgiving (I’ll be working), and the rest shall be happily consumed by myself, throughout the winter and most likely into the spring.