By Greg B. What is Thanksgiving day without some great cranberry relish and some awesome turkey gravy to pour over top of your food on the plate?  Below I’ll give you some suggestions on recipes to put the finishing touches on your Thanksgiving day celebration!

Lets talk cranberry sauce/relish.  As a kid, I never really liked the flavor of cranberries, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to really enjoy it with turkey.  Now, I think of them as an integral part of the meal, both for some delicious sweet/tartness and also to add an interesting and delicious texture to the turkey!  If you are going to use fresh cranberries, apparently (as I saw on the discovery channel) the way to tell they are freshest is the fresh ones ‘bounce’, due to an air pocket inside the berry (makes sense, since they do float on water).  I don’t know how you or your local grocer feel about you bouncing cranberries to check for freshness, but it’s just something to keep in mind for another day.  For ingredients, you will need:

• ~ 12oz cranberries (fresh, frozen, it’s up to you)
• 1/3 cup of light brown sugar
• 1/3 cup granulated sugar
• 2 tbsp orange zest
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 1/2 cup water

In a saucepan, combine your liquids and sugars until you get it fully dissolved and bring to a slow simmer.  Then add your cranberries and your orange zest, cook for another 5-10 minutes, or until your cranberries ‘pop’.  You can also add spices to this if you want something extra, like cinnamon.  This recipe will make about 2-3 cups of volume, so multiple as necessary!  It is also possible to add chopped nuts, or even diced apples to this dish, once again, if you want to jazz it up a bit.

OK, so the cranberry sauce is easy and you can make it a few days in advance, to get over that holiday cooking rush.  But gravy is not so easy.  I used to never make good gravy in college and afterwards, part of the reason is moving every year and getting used to a new stove every time, I had a hard time understanding the heat properties of the new stovetop burners.  That, and I also used to make basic mistakes about quantity of fat to leave in the gravy (something that does not go well with your flour addition).  So here is the simple recipe, with my added cautionary comments!  You will need:

• Drippings from the pan of the roasted turkey
• Gizzards from this turkey
• Water
• Flour

For about the last hour of your turkey roasting, take the gizzards, put them in a small pot of water, and boil them to cook them.  Just toss everything in, the stomachs, heart, kidneys, livers, neck, you name it, it all goes in here.  Add some salt and pepper (you can even snack on the turkey liver once it’s cooked… I try to save some for the gravy but it’s hard!).  Once the turkey comes out of the oven though, it’s time to start working on that gravy while the bird rests, so make sure you have taken your gizzards out of the pot and let them cool for a few minutes.  You can even de-meat the neck as much as you can, slice up the rest of the organs too.

Take the drippings from the turkey pan and look at them.  What will you see?  Well, probably any spices you added to the turkey, but also fat.  Lots of fat.  Now while this is delicious, it does not work well when making gravy.  Why?  As you add your mixture of flour/water (get to that in a minute), the oil will coat the flour and make it more clump and difficult to go into solution.  One solution is to pour all the drippings into a more vertical cylindrical container, so the fat going to the top, can easily be separated off.  But wait!  You don’t want to get rid of ALL of the fat.  We have some good uses for that…

Take about 1/4 cup of the fat if you can, put it in a medium saucepan and add about 1/4 cup of flour.  Heat slowly, constantly mixing and watching for the color to turn this light golden color.  At this moment, add whatever volume of drippings you had, sans turkey fat.  Pour this into your pan with the fat and flour, stirring all the way and adding the diced organs and meat from the gizzards.  Keep the heat on low, and make a 1:1 mixture of flour and cold water in another container.  Keep stirring the saucepan with the mixture, making sure no clumps form and also keeping it from sticking to the bottom of the pan and burning.  Occasionally you can add some of the new flour/water mixture, to increase the thickness of your gravy, if you so desire.  Over time, the gravy should turn that delicious brown/gray color.  You can add spices, salt, whatever you want to and need to, in order to bring this to your favorite flavor.

And that is it!  Pour this into a gravy boat and serve to your guests.  This will make about 2 cups or so of gravy, but it all depends on the size of your turkey, how much drippings it had, if you added volume to the roasting pan before/during the roasting, etc.  But the real keys are LOW heat, or else you’re ‘frying’, in a way, the flour and that’s not what you want (except at the start, with the flour/fat mixture), always be mixing slowly, and never forget to take a lot of the turkey fat away, or else you will get a clump, dumpling-esque style gravy.  Of course, you can always freeze that fat and use it for cooking another day.

So I hope you all enjoyed these recipes and that I have been somewhat of a help to you all.  If you have any questions, please post, I’ll be around until Thanksgiving morning and checking the blog of course.  Have a great Thanksgiving, either with family, friends or on your own.  Cheers!