No Thanksgiving dinner is complete without a side of cranberry sauce. In every home I’ve ever eaten this holiday dinner, the necessary sauce has always come from a can.

I’ve had the honor of eating the meals of some pretty accomplished cooks (both my grandmas, Mike’s mom…), yet even they served us up canned cranberry sauce. This led me to believe that cranberry sauce must be ridiculously hard to make. I mean, if my mom’s mom was willing to get up at 4 am every year to stuff a 25 lb turkey as a start to her cooking day, and she wasn’t willing to bother making homemade cranberry sauce, then it must be too herculean a task to even consider.

Well, consider we did; so consider it done. Out of curiosity, Mike and I looked into a basic whole cranberry sauce recipe. Ocean Spray, kings of the cranberry kingdom, shares this recipe. Seems pretty easy, right? I can assure you it was. We made ours last night. As I type, there is a perfectly jellied cranberry sauce sitting in our fridge. It was tremendously easy. Plus, it is one of the sides that you can make early and it won’t negate the freshness factor.

So what gives with all the cans? A cranberry cover-up conspiracy brought to you by the aluminum can industry? Damn you, Big Aluminum.