batting cleanup.

When cleaning out a kitchen, I mean truly cleaning out a kitchen, in the way that moving the kitchen to another part of the house would necessitate....well, one finds things. For example one might find four or five unfinished bags of red lentils, or dried couscous, or penne pasta or some other pantry staple that one uses semi-frequently but that always seems to somehow evade completely being used.

Another class of found food would maybe be the things one might have purchased as a kind of diet or health or one-time cooking experiment and then lost track of almost immediately after one realized that absolutely zero members of the household enjoyed ingesting the substance in its natural state. Spirulina powder springs to mind. Flaxseed. Nori.

I kept stumbling across this giant bag of dried cranberries every few months while looking for something else and then forgetting about either its existence or its location. But now: gotcha.

+++

cranberry-mandarin-ginger something.

3 cups dried cranberries
1 cup water
1/3 cup raw sugar
zest and juice of one actual orange
zest and juice of one actual lemon
some number of the about-to-go-bad dry-as-shit mandarin oranges from the airbnb upstairs, peeled and sectioned
1/4 tsp salt
1 tbsp fresh ginger, grated
whatever unoxidized nuts that have been abandoned, chop-ped
a pinch of cinnamon, cloves, and/or nutmeg?

Add all ingredients and boil lightly until it tastes like something.