Cranberry Salsa, You Are My New Favorite Holiday App.

My friend Amanda has a gorgeous recipe for a cranberry-salsa-topped dip with cream cheese. I’ve had my eye on it for years, and this was the year I finally tried it. LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!

It is finely textured, juicy, zippy, fresh and sweet with a little bit of fire from the jalapeño.

There are plenty of cranberry salsa or cranberry relish-type recipes out there, but the best thing she does that’s different from other recipes is that she adds a knob of fresh ginger. Hello! So good.

I brought her dip on the platter, with the creamy base, to a holiday party in our neighborhood and it was delicious. Beautiful. So wonderful. But when we came back home, both Bjork and I went straight to the fridge for just the extra cranberry salsa – eating it plain, nothing else with it, just dipping chips straight into it like hungry little wolves.

The really fun part is that over the next few days, I found myself using that cranberry salsa on EVERYTHING – a dollop on a turkey wrap with spinach and mayo. A shmear of it on toast. A spoonful of it into my chicken and rice bowl.

So, here’s the recipe for the salsa, as I made it – I made only a few slight changes to Amanda’s recipe, most significantly, using garlic instead of green onions (just what we prefer in this house), throwing some bonus parsley in there, and adding a decent amount of pistachios for some extra body and a buttery crunch.

You can eat it fresh, for sure, but don’t skip the rest time in the fridge for some Day 2 action. It gets a little less aggressively tart and a lot more juicy.

I’ve already made it twice in the last week. Cheers to last-minute holiday recipes for people like me!