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This week, we’ve invited a few of our authors to share Thanksgiving staples, family recipes, or dishes that somehow always make it onto their holiday tables! Today’s recipe is from Darcie Chan, author of The Mill River Recluse and The Mill River Redemption.
The beauty of this cranberry salad isn’t just in how fabulous it looks and tastes, but also in the fact that it is best prepared a day ahead of time, before the real crush of cooking gets underway.
Growing up, my mom and two sisters and I would sit around the dining room table the evening before Thanksgiving. We didn’t have an electric chopper back then, so each of us would get a knife and cutting board and start chopping up one of the main ingredients — cranberries, walnuts, celery, or apples. Inevitably, we’d get bored with the work and start telling stories and jokes, which would then degenerate into making faces across the table and otherwise acting like idiots. Once we finally had everything chopped and ready to combine, our faces and sides ached from laughing. My mom usually ended up pulping the oranges (since we hated doing that and she was best at it, anyhow) and getting everything into the pan and then the fridge. Finally, the four of us would totter off to bed, often still giggling, and always happily anticipating snitching some of the finished cranberry salad for breakfast!
Ingredients:
1 can whole berry jellied cranberry sauce
2 large boxes sugar-free cherry Jell-O
2 cups walnuts, chopped
2 apples, peeled and finely chopped
1.5 bags whole fresh cranberries, finely chopped
2 cups celery, finely chopped
Pulp of 2 large oranges
Preparation:Image may be NSFW.
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Combine all ingredients except for the jellied cranberry sauce and the Jell-O in a large bowl and stir until well-mixed. Set aside.
Boil water for Jell-O. In a glass 9″ x 13″ pan, stir Jell-O powder into boiling water per instructions on the box until Jell-O is completely dissolved. Add the canned cranberry sauce to the Jell-O liquid and stir until it, too, is dissolved.
Add the combined ingredients in the bowl to the liquid in the 9″ x 13″ pan, as well as the remaining water called for in the instructions on the Jell-O box (or as much of the water as will fit in the pan) and stir gently until evenly mixed.
Place pan in refrigerator for several hours until Jell-O mixture is firm and set.
