Pineapple Red Wine Cranberry Sauce

A fruity tart-sweet cranberry sauce loaded with lots of crushed pineapple that makes a turkey feast SO much more enjoyable! Made in the microwave, this amazing cranberry sauce couldn’t be any simpler. I’m proud to say, too, that THIS is the cranberry sauce that got my family to like cranberry sauce.

Happy Thanksgiving, my sweet foodie friends! Usually, my family all gathers at my parents’ place for a big feast. There is always hunting going on. As I’m not a hunter, I usually stay in and cook, drink wine and relax. This year, though, with all the coronavirus rampant in our country (and especially our state), we all decided it was best to stay home. We’ve got a great feast planned for the three of us (me and my kids), though, and I’m super excited.

It’s SO quiet in my house right now. Both my adult offspring are still in bed, although my daughter did get up early this morning so we could go do some practice driving. She’ll be taking her driving test on Monday, so we’re going to go driving each day this weekend to help her practice. We both hate it, this getting-ready-for-the-test driving practice, but we know the more she does it, the more driving will feel “normal” to her, the less her anxiety can take over and the better she’ll do on her test. I think I’m almost more nervous than she is about this dang test! I hope she passes …

Anyway, I couldn’t wait to get back from driving practice to begin cooking for the day and I could feel the relief in her voice when I told her it was time to head home. I had planned to start with the dinner rolls, but I didn’t. As we were out driving, something triggered a memory from last Thanksgiving of a pineapple cranberry sauce that I made for my family last year. For years, I’ve brought homemade cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving (because I love it) and for years, everyone seems to skip on the cranberry sauce. Which is fine, I guess. I know they have pre-conceived notions about cranberry sauce (just like I did, until my boyfriend one year made a cranberry sauce that I ABSOLUTELY loved). They think they don’t like it.

Last year I challenged them to try the cranberry sauce. They were so resistant, claiming “I don’t like cranberry sauce”, so I looked about and found a recipe for pineapple cranberry sauce and said, “how about this? It’ll be more like a fruit sauce than a cranberry sauce.” They thought perhaps they might actually be willing to try that, so I made it. And several family members took some sauce. And then, much to our surprise, the turkey was dry. My family has a bunch of excellent cooks, so the turkey is NEVER dry. My sister had brined this turkey and my dad and sis got it cooking early in the morning. It had plenty of time to cook and rest in its juices, but oh man, that turkey made me choke a bit.

My dad mentioned that dry turkey is the reason people started making cranberry sauce. The tart-sweet of cranberry sauce makes your mouth water and provides a counterpoint of sweet and sour flavors, so dry turkey tastes better. Suddenly my cranberry sauce was REALLY popular. We all wanted turkey and lots of it and the bird certainly had lots of flavor, but it was lacking in the moisture department.

I think I must have written down the recipe on a slip of paper and intended to write it up later, but I lost the paper, never photographed the sauce, and so, this year, when the memory came rushing back to me, I decided to make it again. It’s a simple microwave recipe, so even if the stove is full of pots, you can still get your sauce ready. Of course, it’s also the perfect thing to make ahead of time and pull out of the fridge at feast-time. Nobody has to know how little you worked on the cranberry sauce. 😉

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