Cranberry Salad while we still have cranberries

Cranberry season is drawing to a close! The last of the fresh cranberries have tragically migrated from the discount produce rack to the dumpster behind the store. This means that I only have the embarrassingly high number of cranberry bags I piled into my cart when I saw the clearance sign.

Cranberry Salad 1 (3 oz) box red jello (raspberry, strawberry, or suchlike) 1 cup boiling water 1 or 2 oranges, supremed (see guide here)-- or if that looks like too much work, simply juice the oranges (or use canned oranges) About 6 oz fresh cranberries 1 or 2 tart apples 1 can (undiluted) orange juice concentrate (You won't use it all) Around ¼ cup sugar Mix the gelatin and boiling water, stirring until dissolved. Wring out all the juice from the supremed oranges and stir it in. Coarsely grind the cranberries in either a hand-cranked grinder or a food processor. Then grind the apples a bit more finely than the cranberries, and stir them in. (You want to grind the apples last so they don't have any time to sit out and go brown.) If any juice dripped out of the fruit, add it to the pot (or just drink it). Add the sugar. Then add about 1 or 2 tablespoons of orange juice concentrate. Taste it, and either add more sugar, more orange concentrate, or both to taste. Place in a clear bowl and refrigerate until smooth. (It looks best in a clear bowl-- the light coming through it really shows off the color.) Note: This doesn't set very firm-- it's more like a spreadable relish than a freestanding gelatin. Source: Poppy Crocker in the comments for my great-grandmother's cranberry salad

Today, we are trying a cranberry salad from our Pieathlon friend Poppy Crocker, who writes over at Grannie Pantries. If you haven't looked at her blog, you should. She lovingly chronicles all the bygone foods that present-day food historians have desperately tried to bury. 

Anyway, I first read the recipe and thought "This looks pretty good!" Then I thought "Wait a minute, cranberry sauce without the celery?"

If you want the approximate recipe (well, halved since you always make half-recipes, and also approximate since grandma was never big on measuring): 1 box red gelatin dissolved in 1 cup hot water (we usually used raspberry). Mix half-bag of fresh cranberries and 1-2 apples-- both ground in the meat grinder, and do the cranberries first so the apples won't get brown-- with about 1/4 cup of sugar, then add to Jell-O. Add 1-2 oranges (supremed) and whatever juice you can wring out of the membranes and 1 8-oz. can of crushed pineapple. (Try tidbits if you don't want the texture of crushed.) Add a couple tablespoons of thawed orange juice concentrate. Stir it all together. Taste it and add more sugar and/or orange juice concentrate until you hit the flavor you like. Then refrigerate for a few hours and serve right out of the bowl. (It's not thick enough to unmold, plus who would want the fuss?)

We had to do some tedious knifework before we could get to the fun parts of the recipe. I'd never heard of "supreming" an orange, but I found this handy guide on Martha Stewart's website. I like that the last step is to wring all the juice out of your offcuts because 1) it reduces waste and 2) our recipe says to do that anyway. It's always reassuring when directions from different sources agree with each other.

So, to supreme an orange, you first have to cut off the peel. You can't just peel it off because you want all those membranes gone. This was surprisingly tricky because the orange gets squishier as you cut more off. Then you cut the fruit out from between the internal membranes. As bad as my attempt looks, I can conclusively say that I at least had a sharp knife. This is easy to prove: at no point did our navel oranges become blood oranges.

I thought purchasing two oranges was a bit excessive until I saw how very little orange we got out of them. Just compare the size of the discard heap to what we kept. I'm tempted to say that next time I'll just buy a can of oranges, but (as I've said before) I hate canned oranges. (If you like them, feel free to use I

To be fair, the waste heap shrank a little when I squeezed the juice out of the membranes (and out of the fruit that got cut off with the peel). And we had a lot of juice from what's supposed to be scraps.So I don't think I threw out any more orange than I usually do when juicing them.

All this juice came out of the offcuts.

Next, we are supposed to use red Jello. Poppy Crocker said they usually use raspberry, but that was surprisingly elusive at the grocery store. So I got cherry instead. This may have been a mistake, because it smelled like cough syrup.

Just look at that beautiful cherry red!

As a recipe note, I only added a couple spoons of sugar because 1) there was plenty of sugar in the Jello box, and 2) I don't like my cranberry salad to be sweet enough to top a cheesecake.

With our oranges supremed and the Jello dissolved, we were ready for the fun part: shoving a lot of fruit through a meat grinder.

I was really excited about this. Check out the fruit-to-Jello ratio. This salad does not skimp on the good stuff.

I probably should have ground the apples more finely, but I didn't think of that until I was halfway done.

Our recipe says to do the apples second so they wouldn't have any time to go brown. Happily, this also means that we won't leave any cranberries behind in the grinder. The apples will push the last berries out, and I won't feel nearly so bad about rinsing apple down the sink. You can get apples any time of year, but fresh cranberries are a precious resource.

Our grinder dripped a lot of juice as we cranked it. I tipped it into the pot, but only because I (barely) resisted the temptation to just drink it.

Next, it was time for the pineapple. I was so excited about the meat grinder that I forgot that this salad is incomplete without opening at least one can. As suggested, I got pineapple tidbits because I didn't like how fibrous the crushed pineapple was last time we put it in gelatin. But crushed pineapple might have been the better choice here. At the very least, it would have blended in better with all the other pulverized fruit. I decided to pluck the pineapple back out of the pot and get out the scissors. 

And here it is, ready to refrigerate! 

Actually, hold on a minute. Is this really a halved recipe? Poppy said it was in the comments, but this is a lot of cranberry salad. Clearly I'm not the only person who really likes cranberries when they're in season. I was looking forward to a lot of peanut-butter-and-cranberry sandwiches, serving this after dinner, and being able to just take out a spoonful whenever I felt like the day needed a cranberry lift. And it'd be great on cold-cut sandwiches throughout cranberry season.

As aforementioned, this came out more like a relish than a salad. You could add an extra packet of unflavored gelatin if you really want a cranberry salad that can stand for itself, but I liked this as it was. Freestanding gelatins are often like eating rubbery water anyway.

But I don't think I should have used cherry-flavored gelatin. If the lemon jello in the earlier recipe was too weak to cut through the cranberries, the cherry was too strong for everything else in it and made this taste like cold medicine. 

Artifical cherry aside, I like how unlike a lot of other cranberry salads, this seemed like an actual salad and not a rebadged dessert. It contains so much fruit that (unlike the other cranberry salads I've made) it might actually be good for you. Either way, it's a wonderful way to serve fresh fruit.