Thanksgiving Recipe Guide: Healthy Cranberry Goodness

Cranberry dishes are one of our family's favorite Thanksgiving holiday traditions. Cranberries aid digestion, cleanse the colon, detox the body and prevent UTI, or urinary tract infections. Here are our best cranberry recipes. We enjoy cranberry juice and canned cranberries year round, but we prefer the fresh raw cranberries available during the holiday season.

Cranberries are the perfect Thanksgiving and holiday fruit. The first puritans (pilgrims) and surely the native Americans living along the Atlantic seaboard would have known and enjoyed cranberries. Cranberries are a bog berry; a bog is the damp sandy area near the shore of a large lake or the Atlantic ocean. Native Americans prized these tart, ruby red berries and dried them for use in winter. Cranberries are ripe in the fall, and so would have been introduced at the time when we suppose the first Thanksgiving feasts to have taken place.

Here are our favorite cranberry dishes:

Dried cranberries: Drying is one of the healthiest ways to preserve foods. Use your food dehydrator or oven. Set your oven to 200 degrees to dry fruit. Arrange washed cranberries in a single layer on cookie sheets lined with foil or lightly sprayed with olive oil cooking spray. Sprinkle some Florida Crystals Organic Cane Sugar (produced in green plants and certified Carbon Free). over the berries. Unsweetened cranberries are extremely tart. Bake until berries are shriveled like raisins.

I like to dry apples with the cranberries for a tangy sweet dried harvest fruit blend. Serve on hot and cold cereals, and cooked rice. Cook into sauce, add to stuffing mix for a tangy, zesty poultry dressing. Add to breads and cakes.

Cranberry Sauce: Every year at Thanksgiving, I make pots of scarlet cranberry sauce, by simply washing the berries, adding one half of Florida Crystals and one cup of cold water per bag of cranberries. Bring to boil and reduce heat. Cranberries will burst and make a singing noise and the sugar and water form a thick, rich sauce.

Not-So-Boring Thanksgiving Turkey: I dislike turkey. Many folks have said they agree. Turkey can be dry and tasteless. For a delicious way to jazz up turkey, serve sliced turkey with cranberry sauce. The juxtaposition of tangy berries and savory turkey makes turkey stand up and dance the can-can.

Turkey Pasta Salad: Make this recipe as you would chicken salad, using leftover turkey in place of chicken. For turkey salad sandwich filling, omit pasta and fill croissants with turkey salad. Vegetarians, skip the turkey altogether or replace with diced extra firm tofu or miso. Vegans: replace mayonnaise with tahini.

one pound diced cooked turkey
1 cup chopped cranberries
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup diced cucumber
1 pound cooked seashell pasta
1 cup mayonnaise
half teaspoon salt
half teaspoon pepper
half teaspoons celery seed
one teaspoon dill weed

For more delicious recipes, visit me at www.greatfood.blogspot.com . Have a happy,healthy Thanksgiving with the goodness of fresh cranberries.