Cranberry Salad

The window for testing Cranberry Salad was short

There were a few recipes in Grandma's box that were holiday specific, and this was one. Fresh cranberries were a key item, and those could only be found in our stores after Halloween. So, I kept a lookout and grabbed a bag of beautiful tart berries as soon as they appeared. There would be no turkey to serve this salad with, not yet anyway. I wanted to test it well ahead of Thanksgiving Day so I could share the good news if it turned out to be good. 

How to make Cranberry Salad

The first thing I did was make some decisions about the ingredients, one of which was celery. If you haven't heard, there are many jokes and stereotypes about people in Utah eating carrots in their green Jell-O. I have not been and don't ever intend to be one of those people. Neither am I a person who eats celery in her raspberry Jell-O. So, I didn't add celery to my shopping list when I was ordering the ingredients for this salad. 

The next thing I did was try to figure out what Grandma meant by "Put cranberries and apple thru food chopper." 

I have a Pampered Chef food chopper, but I wasn't sure if that was what Grandma was referring to. Did she have one? I wasn't sure, but I was pretty sure she never had a food processor. 

I took out my food chopper and made short work of chopping the apples and cranberries into small pieces.  

I then mixed them with some sugar in the bowl. 

The next step was to cut twelve marshmallows into pieces and add them to the fruit mixture. That sounded like a lot of extra work when I could just use mini marshmallows. Some searching led me to this site, which has a marshmallow conversion chart, something I would never have guessed I would need. There, I found that 12 large marshmallows were equivalent to a cup and a half of mini marshmallows. Those went into the bowl with the chopped fruit. 

I stirred the mixture together and put it into the fridge to "let stand overnight." Fortunately, I had read the recipe through and realized I needed to account for several periods of chilling.

The next morning, I toasted some pecans . . . 

 . . . and prepared some raspberry Jell-O. I used the quick set method so that I could add it to the mixture in the fridge before I left for church. 

The quickly cooled Jell-O and the chopped pecans went into the bowl that held the rest of the salad ingredients. The marshmallows floated to the top, but there wasn't much I could do about that. 

I put the bowl back into the fridge with the thought that the glass bowl was nice enough to use as a serving dish. We could just scoop the set-up mixture from there. Several hours later, I took it out to add the topping, and it looked like this. 

Grandma said to serve it with whipped cream. I could have done that, and I'm sure it would have tasted fine, but I decided to add my sister-in-law's special Jell-O topping. To make it, I whipped one cup of whipped cream, added softened cream cheese, powdered sugar, and vanilla. When I spread that over the mixture in the bowl, it formed a thick, luxurious-looking layer that contrasted beautifully with the bright red underneath.

The Verdict on Cranberry Salad

It looked so good, I couldn't imagine how this salad could go wrong--until I began scooping it out and found that it hadn't set.   

Sure, it still looked good, and it actually great too--tart and sweet, creamy and crunchy--but my brain wanted it to be firmer because it knew I was eating a Jell-O fruit salad. The contents of the bowl had disappeared by the end of the meal, but I still felt the urge to tweak.  

The next evening, I was back at the counter, chopping up apples and cranberries, but this time I added half as much sugar as the recipe called for. The reason? I intended to add less water to the Jell-O, which meant it would be concentrated. The morning after that, I mixed up another package of raspberry Jell-O with one cup of water instead of the usual two. Everything else remained the same. 

This time, I decided to pour the mixture into a rectangular glass dish to see what that looked like. It looked thin, to be honest. But it did set up. I spread the same topping on (it was fabulous), and served myself a slice. 

You can see all the interesting bits this salad contains. The marshmallows added a sweet gooiness, and there was plenty of crunch, even without added vegetables. Try adding celery if you will, but this Cranberry Salad is delicious as is, blissfully celery-free.