No Refined Sugar Apple Cranberry Sauce

I love cranberry sauce, but I don’t love the massive amount of sugar that goes into it. My solution was to offset the tartness of the cranberries with sweet fruits.

My first attempt involved cooking the cranberries with orange juice and a super sweet apple. The cranberry sauce was almost, but not quite sweet enough. I needed to add a small amount of sweetener to take the edge off the tartness.

For my next attempt, I used white grape juice and golden raisins. That did the trick. The apples, golden raisins and white grape juice add sweetness without changing the taste of the cranberries.

If you puree this, the texture, from the apple, becomes something between applesauce and cranberry sauce.

Sour Cherry Jam

I just made sour cherry jam. So exciting. . . It was surprisingly easy. One pound of pitted cherries, 1 1/2 cups of sugar and lots of cooking.  I mostly followed David Lebovitz’s no recipe recipe , but I added in about 1/3 of a box of pectin in the beginning as insurance (looking at this recipe from Slashfood.