Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Christmas Food Ideas For Fruit Salad







Fruit salad is a traditional dish served at Christmas dinner.


Colorful, crisp and flavorful fruit salad is traditional for Christmas dinner. Apples are ideally suited to the winter months. Harvested in late fall, apples are plentiful and fresh. Fruit salad provides a splash of freshness to the table and is a light and nutritious accompaniment to a typically heavy meal. Fruit salad is eaten as a side dish during dinner but in many cases easily doubles as a dessert.


Red and Green Apple Salad


Fresh apples, tossed in lemon juice to retard discoloration, cored and diced into bite-size pieces, are hearty enough to support heavier ingredients such as mayonnaise and sour cream. Chopped dates and walnuts add even more crunchiness, and red and green maraschino cherries, mixed throughout the salad and artfully arranged on top, give the salad true holiday flair. Mix all ingredients together, other than the mayonnaise and sour cream, and refrigerate. Add the mayonnaise and sour cream just before serving.


Cranberry Delight








Cranberries dishes are served is many ways for Christmas. There are recipes for cranberry relishes to enjoy with turkey and stuffing and cranberry salads to eat with the meal. What makes this recipe appropriate is that in addition to it serving as a salad during the meal, it is also suitable as a delicious dessert enjoyed after the meal has settled. A graham cracker crust pressed into a square or rectangular salad dish and filled with a smooth blend of cream cheese, confectioners' sugar, milk and vanilla form the base of the cranberry delight salad. The cream cheese blend is topped with cooked fresh cranberries boiled and simmered with sugar and water with orange marmalade and pecans stirred in after the cranberries cool. The cranberry blend is covered with fluffy whipped cream. The salad is served by chilling it thoroughly and cutting it into smaller square portions for the dinner table and larger squares for a dessert.


Christmas Fruit Salad


Hosting Christmas dinner requires a great deal of effort preparing food, timing everything so each dish is ready to serve at the same moment and doing this while entertaining a steady stream of guests and family wandering through the kitchen. Simplify the fruit salad preparation without losing quality of presentation or flavor. A delicious and quickly prepared fruit salad is made by slicing firm bananas into bite-size pieces and tossing them in peach pie filling, coating them completely. Mix in red and green maraschino cherries cut into halves, pineapple chunks and mandarin oranges. Toss well and refrigerate. This salad complements the meal by adding a sweet fresh flavor to the traditionally heavy food.


Christmas Salad


Even the most finicky eaters, whether children or adults, will enjoy this salad and also get nutritious fruit at the same time. Sliced bananas and red and green apples, tossed in lemon juice, mandarin oranges, angel hair coconut, fruit cocktail, red and green maraschino cherries and chunk pineapple are combined with colored miniature marshmallows, chopped walnuts and whipped topping, then chilled. The result is delectable and nutritious, especially if non-fat topping is used.

Tags: Christmas dinner, fruit salad, Fruit salad, green maraschino, green maraschino cherries