Roselle Mock Cranberry Sauce

Roselle is one of those garden plants that hardly anyone knows about.  I first saw it growing at Karen Sherwood's farm about ten years ago, and was impressed as much by its striking appearance as I was with the flavor of some homemade soda Karen had made with it.

It is common and well-known in the Caribbean, Southern Asia, Southern India, and North Africa.  Nutritious and medicinal, roselle is related to okra and cotton.  It needs a long season to grow and is one of those wonderful, multi-use plants.  The stalks have strong fibres that can be used to make rope, the leaves are also edible and can be cooked like spinach, and all sorts of different things are made with the fleshy red calyxes that form after the flower has bloomed, from tea to jam.

Here in the South, Roselle was often called "The Florida Cranberry" for the tart, cranberry-like flavor of the calyxes.  A very convincing "cranberry" sauce that is simple to make a can be made from it with all local and home-grown ingredients.  I hope this might inspire you to consider making your Thanksgiving a local-food feast!

  

 Roselle Mock Cranberry Sauce

First of all, the red calyxes must be peeled away from the green seed pods on the inside.  They are slightly prickly and uncomfortable to handle, so you might want to wear gloves if you have sensitive hands (not me - I garden too much).  If you are shucking  A LOT of roselle, a roselle corer is easy to make and makes the task go much faster.

The corer on the left in the photo was made by gluing a 3-inch piece of thin brass tubing to a piece of wood with a hole bored in the middle.

Now you are ready for the recipe:

2 cups shucked roselle calyxes, very freshly picked

1/2 cup water (you can also use fresh-squeezed orange juice instead for a more citrus-y holiday flavor, or add sliced kumquats, etc.)

1/2-1 cup honey, depending on how sweet of a sauce you like

1.  Put roselle and water together in a sauce pan.  Bring to a boil over a low flame with the lid on.  Cook until the roselle is soft.

2.  With a blender or food processor, blend up the sauce.  Add honey to taste.  If the sauce is too thin, you can cook it down over low heat.  It will gel in the fridge if it is cooked down enough.

Notes:  Salt and pepper are interesting additions to this sauce, and give it a more savoury, almost ketchup-like flavor.  It goes well either way with all kinds of meats.

The old summer garden

We keep the garden by halves, so that each season the land gets a rest.
The summer half of the garden has been interesting this year.
Even after the goats and cows trampled and munched their way through it, it became a wild tangle.  Roguish hybrid cucumbers, sunflowers, tomatoes, melons, dent corn and amaranth seeded themselves rampantly.  The dent corn even tasseled and bore little ears.  The zinnias became monstrous.

At it's peak, my children would get lost in the overgrown grass and weeds.

The Roselle is flowering its strange and lovely flowers.

Massive Spanish needles have taken over in places, each a humming and vibrant ecosystem, alive with many different kinds of bees, flies and butterflies and things that eat them.  I saw at least 5 different types of bees nectaring one day, and not a single one like our honey bees.  Just one of these bidens bushes is at least 10 feet across.

It's a jungle out there.

The Roselle is blooming!  I've been drying bunches of it.
It's the first year the Roselle has survived long enough to produce anything.  And it really has survived.  I haven't watered it at all since the rest of the summer garden died back, I think in late July.  And then when the animals were in I had put up a strand of non-zappy electric netting fence to keep everyone off the Roselle and just eating the weedy old garden.  But guess where we found Miss May's head stuck every single day they were in there?

Every day we would come out and hear a miserable "Maaaaah!" and see May stuck, once again, in the netting around the Roselle, surrounded by luscious green things to eat on the outside of the netting, but determined only to entirely devour the forbidden plants.  (She's lucky it wasn't electrified!)

One day she peed for nearly 5 minutes after we had struggled to free her little empty head from the layers of fence, I guess she hadn't been able to all day while she was stuck.  You'd think she would have learned, but no.  Weeks later we put the animals back in just for one day because of a crazy fencing problem we were having, and sure enough, May was stuck again.  She managed to strip a bunch of the plants, but they came back and are blooming, along with the unscathed ones.