November is the Month to get Creative with Cranberries

Thanksgiving is almost here, so it’s time to bring out the cranberries! This week is chock full of reasons to celebrate this versatile fruit. November 21 is National Cranberry Day, November 22 is National Cranberry Relish Day and November 23 is National EAT a Cranberry Day. Yeah, it’s a lot.

Here’s what you may not know about cranberries – they are found in bogs! Cranberries are a group of evergreen dwarf shrubs that can grow up to 7 feet long and 8 inches high, and Wisconsin produces over half of the entire United States production! And studies have even shown that eating cranberries may help with your kidney and urinary tract function and even have anti-aging effects.

You can find fresh cranberries at pretty much any local grocery store. They’re usually sold in 12-ounce bags for just a few dollars. Look for berries that are bright, intense, and free of discoloration or withering.

But before you decide to pop one of these sweet-tart berries in your mouth –pucker alert! – that’s probably not the best way to enjoy them. Eaten raw, they are rather bitter, but here are tons of ideas for what you can do with the little tart red berry.

While cranberries are divine as cranberry sauce, they also make lovely cheesecakes, and are fantastic added to traditional cookie, pie and tart recipes. If you’d like to think a little out of the classic dessert box, how about putting some relish in a cranberry trifle, make some white chocolate almond cranberry bark, or whip up a cranberry pistachio truffle?

But wait, there’s more! Cranberries are also a wonderful colorful way to brighten up a fall/winter salad, or any vegetable side dish, like roasted Brussels sprouts. And if you like to drink your sugar, cranberries really spice up a traditional hot mulled cider or cocktails like a Moscow Mule.

It is never necessary to buy cranberry relish, because it’s so ridiculously easy to make your own in just minutes on the stovetop. Here are 15 relish recipes to try from the folks at Cooking Light ( 15 recipes for cranberry sauces and relishes).

Five fun facts about cranberry relish:

A barrel of cranberries weighs 100 pounds. Give or take a few, there are about 450 cranberries in a pound and 4,400 cranberries in one gallon of juice.

Contrary to popular belief, cranberries do not grow in water. A perennial plant, cranberries grow on low-running vines in sandy bogs and marshes.

If you strung all the cranberries produced in North America last year, they would stretch from Boston to Los Angeles more than 565 times.

Legend has it that Pilgrims served cranberries, along with wild turkey and succotash, at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

In the 1880s, a New Jersey grower named John “Peg Leg” Webb discovered that cranberries bounce.

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