Today was our Thanksgiving dinner at work. I ate waaaayyyyyyy too much. The food was delicious! I love food, especially comforting food like we have at the holidays. My boss provided the main staples of the meal and we provided a few desserts and such. I decided I would make homemade cranberry relish.

Has anyone ever had any homemade cranberry relish? It is wonderful and so much better than the canned jelly stuff that usually gets served with turkey and dressing. I went to the grocery store over the weekend and much to my dismay they did not have any cranberries. I could not believe it. I almost went into shock. I guess they are not a hot commodity like you would think. You don't just eat cranberries like you do strawberries and cherries, so most places do not stock them.

I called on Monday and found a grocery store near work that had them. He sounded kind of shocked when I asked him if he had a lot of cranberries, apparently there is not a run on cranberries even this close to Thanksgiving! I ran over on my lunchbreak and picked up 2 bags. I figured I better stock up since they are so hard to find. Who knows maybe I would like them and start cooking more things that included cranberries.

I got ready to make my cranberry-tangerine relish last night, I was so excited. I love trying new recipes. I had never really seen a cranberry, not a real one anyway. I didn't know if they had seeds or pits, the recipe was sort of vague on the topic. So I decided that I would try one and be sure that they were good with no pits or seeds. Okay first of all cranberries are extremely bitter, no one ever bothered to tell me that. So here I am at like 10:00 last night standing in my kitchen trying to drink something to get the bitter cranberry taste out of my mouth. It was awful. No wonder there isn't a run on them at the grocery store. They certainly look better than they taste. So I proceeded to make my recipe and it turned out great. Everyone that ate some said it was delicious and I thought it was too. Amazing what a lot of sugar and boiling can do to change the taste of something. Then when you added the tangerine it was just wonderful.

Just goes to show that sometimes you can take bitter awful things and turn them into something wonderful.

When life hands you lemons make lemonade or put them in your iced tea.

When life hands you cranberries, make cranberry relish.