There’s an awesome cranberry wassail recipe I wanted to share. This was a huge hit at last year’s holiday gatherings.
Take a one pound bag of cranberries, three cinnamon sticks, and 2 tsps cloves (or allspice or pumpkin pie spice) and put it in a pan with 6 cups of water. Bring it to a good vigorous boil, then turn it down to simmer for about an hour.
This will cook the cranberries and make for a luscious, delicious Christmas smell all throughout your house!
Then, strain the cranberries. If you don’t like a lot of pulp, you’ll want to use a coffee filter. For ourselves, we just used a small-holed strainer and called it good. (All the pulp settles to the bottom anyway and we just scooped the wassail off the top).
Then put the wassail into a crock pot and add 2 more cups of water, and some generous squirts of lemon juice. Then comes orange. We used about 10 drops of sweet orange essential oil, but if you don’t have that a spoonful or two of OJ concentrate would be fine.
Then sweeten it to your taste with your preferred sweetening. We made it kind of moderately sweet with monk fruit (so that I, as a diabetic, could drink it without spiking my glucose), and then everyone just added sugar or whatever to their cups according to their likes.
Like I said, it was a big hit!!