Pantry Friendly Spiced Cranberry Sauce

A recipe whose entire purpose is to dress up chicken to make dinner more interesting?  Gee, I wonder why I would find a need to create one of those.

Kidding.  Kind of.

Anyway, I came up with this recipe the other night when we were having chicken for the third time in a week and I desperately needed something to "glamorize" the meal up a bit. My husband thought it was so good that I'm definitely going to be making it whenever I need to dress up baked chicken.

This recipe calls for good old fashioned canned cranberry sauce.  I used home canned for this recipe (thus why it is a deep brown as the cranberry sauce was old enough to get brown on me), but the jellied stuff in the shape of the can would work too.  You could probably use whole cranberry sauce too, but you might have to reduce the sauce longer to get the right consistency.

If you don't use all of this on your chicken, refrigerate the leftover cranberry sauce.  It will set up kind of jelly-like and works GREAT on leftover chicken sandwiches.  Just a suggestion.

Pantry Friendly Spiced Cranberry Sauce

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup ( 2 oz) canned cranberry sauce
• 1/2 cup apple or orange juice (if you don't have juice, just use water, but the depth of flavor won't be as intense that way)
• 1/4 tsp. ground sage 
• 1/4 tsp. dried thyme
• 1/8 tsp. dried rosemary
• Salt and pepper to taste

Procedure:

Combine cranberry sauce and apple/orange juice in a small saucepan over medium heat and whisk well till cranberry sauce melts into the juice. 

Add the herbs and simmer over medium low heat until the sauce reduces by about 1/3 into a nice sauce-like consistency.  Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve over baked chicken.