Cranberry Salad
- 1 lb fresh cranberries
- 1 can crushed pineapple, drained
- 1-1/2 cup sugar
- 1 box blackberry jello
- 1 cup hot water
- 3/4 cup cold water
1- Grind cranberries and mix with pineapple and sugar
2- Let sit in fridge for one day
3- Dissolve jello in hot water, add cool water, and add jello mix to cranberry mixture
4- Pour into large casserole dish and refrigerate until ready to serve
It’s no secret that the best part about the holiday season is getting to eat your favorite recipes that one family member only has the gumption to make once a year. Five days before I started this blog I was looking through a book that my aunt made me for a wedding gift four years ago. She photocopied my grandma Sue’s handwritten recipe cards and made a book with grandma’s holiday menus, the recipes, and pictures of us. It’s truly a bittersweet item to hold now. Literally just the day after I looked at that book, my brother texted me and said “Do you know what I want? I want that cranberry jello stuff grandma had at Thanksgiving.” To which I responded, I HAVE THAT RECIPE!
And this is the exact reason for this blog. Creating a permanent and shareable home for family recipes, so they’re not lost or forgotten overtime. Without further ado, let’s talk about cranberries.
First off, let’s address a few things.
1- Yes, I have a culinary degree
2- No, I am not an expert (at anything, really)
3- No, apparently we didn’t use dates OR cranberries in college? A bewildering fact, I must say.
I volunteered to make this recipe for Thanksgiving today. Part of me obviously just wanted to make my brother happy. But there’s another part of me that was curious about cranberries because I’ve never used them before. As per usual, I went into this recipe without a shred of knowledge and for whatever reason I still didn’t just… google it? How I graduated college, I will never know.
About the only thing I knew about cranberries was cranberry spiders. If you don’t like spiders, make a mental note to never wade in a cranberry bog.
I read the Wiki page on cranberry (after accidentally selecting the Wiki page for The Cranberries) and there honestly wasn’t a lot of share-worthy information on it. So, I broke out my copy of The Visual Food Lovers Guide which is a compact little book that gives you the main information on over 1,000 different foods. Here’s what I think you should know:
1- Cranberries are edible raw, but you need to wash them. The main concern here is pesticides, but wash them right before use as excess water can make them spoil faster. For the most part cranberries aren’t eaten raw because of how tart they are, and too many can upset your stomach.
2- Keep your cranberries in the fridge, they deteriorate faster at room temperature (can someone get this info to Walmart? They just throw them in a bin and not a cooler!) They can last around 2 months in a sealed bag in the fridge, or a year in the freezer.
3- When cleaning your cranberries, make sure to pick out any that are dark, soft, or wrinkled. That means they’re going bad. Your cranberries should be a vibrant red and firm, white cranberries are okay if there are a few in there, but try not to buy bags that are mostly white.
I was sitting on my mom’s couch last night (thanks for babysitting!) reminding her of what I was bringing today for Thanksgiving. I mentioned grandmas cranberry salad and I said “oh, I don’t remember if the recipe said I was supposed to start it in advance or not.” So I went home, read the recipe, and sure enough “let sit in the fridge for one day.” We’re already not off to a good start.
Also, can I just say, I cannot stand recipes that call for an odd amount of something that I have to buy in a specific quantity? Make your damn recipe use a FULL can of crushed pineapple, or whatever the ingredient is, what am I going to do with the remaining 1/4 can of something?! This recipe does exactly that, it calls for 1 pound of fresh cranberries, and the bags only come in 12oz. I had to buy two bags, and now I have left over cranberries I am responsible for. This feels like the culinary equivalent of working at the outlet mall, and someone comes in to shop and isn’t paying attention to their kids so then I’m like “well great, now I have to be the responsible one and watch this kid because no one else is.” Except it’s cranberries, and I paid for them, and I have to be responsible enough to make sure they don’t rot in my refrigerator. Anyway.
I came home, I read the recipe. I stood in the kitchen asking my grandma questions into the air. As if she was going to materialize from heaven and say “I always used a food processor, and if they didn’t have blackberry jello at the store, I’d buy raspberry.” Well here’s another holiday spoiler, my grandma did NOT materialize. I was left standing alone in my kitchen nearly in tears because I want to ask her these things so badly, and I can’t. But, we live and we move on and we persevere, and we take the gamble that we make ruin Thanksgiving forever. Who knows!
I’m all over the place.
What does grind cranberries mean, you ask? I truly don’t know. Grind to me seems like you’d be pulverizing them in a mortar and pestle, but if you think I’m about to play pharmacist with 16oz of cranberries, you’re wrong. I threw them in the blender.
A few months ago, one of my friends really started getting interested in cooking. She kept saying how badly she wanted a food processor. I’m not one to kill someone else’s dreams, so I told her to go for it. Although, I didn’t understand why she wanted one so bad. I have never needed a food processor. Ever. We didn’t even use them in culinary school. I asked my brother-in-law, who also went to culinary school. He said the same thing! But reader, I regret to inform you, yesterday I could have used a food processor.
I split the cranberries, pineapple, and sugar and did two batches in the blender. After much struggle and shaking and stirring of the blender, everything mixed to a bright Pepto-pink pulp and I poured both batched into a 9”x13” glass baking dish and stirred both batches together. I left it in the fridge, covered in foil overnight. I didn’t grab any pictures last night, it didn’t even cross my mind. But the color of the cranberry mixture deepened overnight and turned more red.
It’s also worth noting, I did not drain the pineapple like the recipe calls. When I opened the can, there was barely any juice in it, and I did not think my blender would survive if I took out what little liquid there was in the first half of the mix. When I poured the blended mixture into the dish, there was visible liquid pooling at the sides of the pan. I resolved if the liquid was still there in the morning, I would drain it out of the pan. But to my surprise, the liquid was gone in the morning. I am guessing that the cranberries absorbed the excess liquid from the canned pineapple.
After it had rested overnight, I mixed the Jell-O. The recipe originally calls for one large box of blackberry Jell-O, which I could not find, and assume they no longer make. I opted for two small boxes of raspberry flavor instead. I mixed both boxes into 1 cup of hot water and stirred until dissolved, and then added 3/4 cup of cold water. I gently poured the Jell-O mixture over the cranberry mixture, covered with foil, and put it back in the fridge.
I was anxious that this would overflow the pan, but it didn’t. There was a lot of foam on top, but the Jell-O and the cranberry mixture seemed to combine well with truly just minimal stirring.
Unfortunately, after I sat down to type this out once the salad was refrigerating, I realize I once again misread the recipe. I don’t know why this keeps happening, usually I am much better about paying attention. The recipe calls for 1-1/2 cup sugar, and I am very sad to say that I read it as 1/2 cup. Because the directions on my grandmas recipe were so bare, I spent some time looking online for similar recipes. I did find one that was close enough, and their recipe said to stir the cranberry and Jell-O mixture after the Jell-O has set to break it up. I asked my dad if he remembered how my grandma served it, and he said he thought she usually stirred it.
I tried the cranberry salad and it was very tart with the missing sugar so I decided to boil some rich simple syrup (a 2:1 sugar/water ratio, as opposed to a 1:1 ratio) and stirred about 1 cup into the cranberry mixture. This absolutely fixed the issue of the cranberry salad being too tart, and made it much more edible. After letting it set in the refrigerator, the final product was about the consistency of applesauce.
I brought my cranberry applesauce salad to thanksgiving dinner, which was met with decent reviews. My dad joked that it was “self healing” because if you took a scoop out, the cranberry sauce slowly filled in the gap in the dish. The general consensus was that it was thin, but the taste was great with an even blend of tartness and sweetness.
Over all, this was a fun easy recipe to make, and would have been even easier if I read the recipe correctly. I hope my grandma isn’t looking down and me shaking her head for finding a way to mess up such a simple holiday dish that she made dozens of times.
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