Chewy oatmeal cookies, with dried cranberries and white chocolate chips scattered throughout!

Cranberry White Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

Oatmeal cookies are my number one favorite cookie.

Although I do enjoy all kinds of cookies from shortbread to tea cakes, to chocolate chip to classic snickerdoodles, oatmeal has always topped the list.

Cranberry Chicken Salad, made with shredded chicken, dried cranberries and pecans, and tossed with a honey mayo dressing, perfect on a cracker, over shredded lettuce or made into sandwiches.

Cranberry Chicken Salad

I do love me some chicken salad! Anytime I have a little bit of chicken leftover from a meal, I pull it and whip it into some form of chicken salad for lunch the next day. I even get the larger rotisserie chickens when I buy them just so I can make some chicken salad the next day. Might be a good basic deli style chicken salad, which I love. Might be a slightly fancier grown up chutney style version served on some still warm croissants. It might just be this one!

Classic cranberry relish, made from uncooked, fresh cranberries, oranges, apples and pineapple.

Cranberry Relish

When I was growing up, there was one cranberry sauce at our house over the holidays. The familiar, cylinder-shaped, super sweet, jellied cranberry sauce, decorated with ridges molded right from the can it slurped out of.

It's one thing in common from our holiday tables past, that so many of us Southerners still connect to nostalgically, no matter where we grew up.

Congealed salads may have gone the wayside in many southern homes, but this Cherry Coke Salad might just bring you right back to it.

Old Fashioned Cherry Coke Salad

Coke Salad. The Amazing Coca-Cola Salad. Cherry Cola Salad. Fruit salad embedded in cherry Jello. Congealed Salad.

It's known by many names, but it's that last term that tends to garner harsh judgment toward the old gelatin encased salads. It's name comes, of course, from that fact that the contents - be they fruit or vegetables - are thickened, or congealed, into gelatin. I'm not sure why congealed salads fell out of favor, and all but disappeared from the holiday table. Maybe it was the term "congealed" that made them sound un-appetizing, but really, although some were made using a bit of shredded vegetables, most are made with fruit, and are simply fruit salads encased in Jello.

Bone-in chicken, cooked in a cranberry and pomegranate sauce, in the slow cooker.

Crockpot Pomegranate Cranberry Chicken

I thought I would experiment with the vintage cranberry chicken bake recipe, and like the other, use a bit of Creole or Cajun seasoning to spice it up a tad, but this time, I decided to add in some pomegranate juice.

What a delightful addition it was!

The pomegranate just gave this an extra tangy punch above the cranberry and produced a nice sauce, even better than the usual. 

The best part?

Spicy Pomegranate Cranberry Sauce

When I was growing up we'd be halfway through the holiday meal when I'd pipe up and say, "Hey, where's the cranberry sauce?"  Invariably, the little can of sliced up jellied cranberry sauce always seemed to be forgotten. I'm pretty sure that I'm the only one who really missed it, but I just love to eat cranberry sauce along with a bite of turkey or ham, and it's just not the same without it really.

A simple seasoned and seared chicken breast finished with a cranberry-based barbecue sauce and baked.

Cranberry Chicken Bake

Cranberry chicken is a very simple recipe - a combination of cranberry sauce turned into a barbecue sauce and baked with a lightly seared chicken.

It's a super easy dish, but the combination of the tart cranberry, with the sweetness of the brown sugar, and just a tiny bit of a kick from some Cajun seasoning, produces a super tasty sauce. Be sure to serve some of that sauce on top of the chicken and also on the side.