Swedish-American Crossover Christmas Cranberry Sauce

My first meeting with cranberries was when I lived in the US for a year as a high school exchange student. I had cranberry juice, cranberry bread, cranberry muffins, and of course, cranberry sauce. I loved it all. We didn't get cranberries in Sweden, at least where I lived. But a few years later, you could finally get Ocean Spray cranberry juice in regular grocery stores (maybe the Sex & the City Cosmopolitan effect), and more and more recipes using cranberries, especially dried ones, showed up. Fresh cranberries are still kind of hard to get hold of, so I was very happy when I found them in our small, student-oriented neighborhood store.

Most of the cranberries went into a rye sourdough fruit and nut bread that Markus made, but the rest were reserved for cranberry sauce. We had a leftover bottle of glögg from last year (actually, maybe from two years ago, since we spent the run-up to last Christmas in Hong Kong) and I got the idea of making a cranberry sauce flavored with glögg. The tart cranberries and the sweet, spiced glögg worked perfectly together! The glögg I used was the low-alcohol version that you can buy in regular grocery stores here in Sweden, but using glögg with higher alcohol content will work as well! The alcohol will vaporize during the boiling.



Cranberry sauce with glögg

80 g sugar
½ dl water
3/4 dl glögg (the regular red-wine kind)
3½ dl cranberries

Bring water and sugar to a boil. Add glögg and cranberries and let simmer over low heat for about 10 minutes or until the cranberries pop.

Christmas spirit in January

The smell and taste of this desert is the quintessential Christmas for me. It incorporates traditional Swedish Christmas flavors: glögg (the Swedish version of mulled wine), saffron and oranges, in a beautifully colored and easy to make desert. So why did I make it in January? Well, we had some glögg left over from last Christmas (2007, that is) that needed to be used, there was saffron in the spice cupboard and oranges are in season. And, most important of all, it tastes divine.

Saffron pannacotta with oranges in glögg marinade

serves 2

Pannacotta:
1½ dl cream
0,25 dl sugar
0,25 g (½ packet) saffron
1 gelatin sheet

For the oranges:
2 oranges
2 dl glögg
1 tbsp maple syrup

For the pannacotta: Soak the gelatin sheet in cold water. Bring the cream, sugar and saffron to a boil while stirring the mixture. Remove from the heat, squeeze out excess water from the gelatin sheet and disolve it in the hot cream. Pour the mixture in two glasses or small bowls. Place in the fridge to set (takes about 3 hours).

Fillet the oranges, there should be no traces of the bitter white parts on the segments. Put in a container or plastic bag, pour the glögg and maple syrup over the oranges to marinate while the pannacotta sets in the fridge.

To serve, get rid of the marinade, and simply portion the beautifully red-tinted orange segments on top of the pannacotta.