Dori’s Cherry Pineapple Jello Salad

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This fun cherry pineapple Jello salad is sure to be a hit with your family. It is a simple make ahead side dish or simple dessert that is festive for a holiday or fun for a BBQ.   

     There is something nostalgic and fun about a good jello salad. This recipe is loaded with cherries and pineapple. It is easy to make and fun to eat. We love it as a scoop and serve salad, but it can easily be converted into a more solid slice if you’d like. Either way it is a tasty way to get enjoy your fruit.  The whipped cream is optional, but highly encouraged!

    This is one of the very first recipes I ever shared in this little corner of the internet.  It was shared with me by my husband’s aunt and it was an instant hit at our house.

    I shared it again in 2016 with updated pictures and shared the origin story of the site.  Each recipe was getting more visitors than ever and it seemed like a good time to give the history.

    Fast forward four more years and here we are.  I have enjoyed sharing recipes with a growing number of people around the world with each passing year.
    
    So it seemed like a perfect time to share both the recipe and the origin story again.  This fun and fruity gelatin salad is perfect for the holidays after-all.

    As it is written, it is a looser jello salad.  The kind you serve in a bowl with a spoon. 

    
    It is sweet with a little bit of tang from the cherries and pineapple.  It is fabulous on its own or dressed up with a bit of whipped cream.

Directions for making this salad sliceable:

It can easily be converted into a more solid slice and serve salad if you would like. The first step is to make sure you drain the pineapple really well.

    Then use six ounces of cherry jello instead of the three.  Dissolve it in a scant two cups of boiling water.
    
    Stir in the fruit and pour into a 9×13″ pan.  Chill for at least two hours, longer is better.

    This will give you a more “solid” jiggly salad.  Both ways taste great!

Blog’s origin story and post from 2016:

       At the end of the year in 2014, I sent out an email to family asking for recipes.  I wanted family favorites. I wanted old recipes that have been in our family forever and new recipes that people were making and loving currently.   

    This was before the blog.  Honestly, it was before I really even knew what blogs were.  I started getting emails with recipes people loved and I couldn’t wait to start cooking my way through them. 
 
     I had a few ideas in mind.  The first was to gather the best of the best and selfishly make sure I had a copy.  The second goal was to find some new favorites for our family.  

     It is so easy to make the same things over and over again, but so much more fun to have some inspiration to try new things!  In the end, I was kind of hoping to put together a fun cookbook as a Christmas present for grandparents and parents.  

     On the drive home from my grandparent’s house one night early in 2015, I decided I could use a blog to organize the recipes. That way I would have a digital record of what we had tried, what we had liked and a place to put a few pictures.  

       As soon as I got home, I put up a random soft pretzel post that night to give it a try and figure out how this blog stuff works.

 I did no research, no thinking about it.  I just did it.  

     A few posts in, I was having fun doing it.  I was able to send links to the family who had shared recipes and show them I had made their favorites and I thought it would be a good way to share old time favorites with extended family (it turns out printing a short run of cookbooks is expensive!)  So I kept at it.  

     Then I started noticing people were seeing what I was doing.  Like real people.  

    Not my family people.  At first it kind of freaked me out.  I knew it was a possibility, but hadn’t done anything to promote or share what I was doing.  

     Then the strangest thing happened.  The more “real” people were seeing my work, the better I wanted it to be.  The more  time I spent on it, the more I wanted somebody to be seeing what I had been putting so much effort into.  

      It has certainly been a learning process.  It has been fun, but a lot of work too.  There are some posts that I am really proud of, some that could use a lot of work.  

      But the best part is I really do have that digital archive to reference when I want to make something, and I know there are some members of my family who reference it for those favorites rather than rifling through recipe cards too.  So in the end, the work has paid off.  

     The blog is being used exactly as I had intended, even if it has gained a whole different life outside of that.  With a full time job, a three year old, and a pretty busy calendar, this blog never quite gets everything I’d like to put into it.  

      It is riddled with typos and the pictures are better than those first ones, but still aren’t quite what I’d like to do.  Though I’m sure even if I had all day to capture the right light and set up props and whatnot there would still be things I’d change!

    All of that to say this is one of the first posts I wrote, revisited.  I thought it would be fun to go back and jazz up a few posts that I did early on when I had no idea what I was doing.  

     The pictures were terrible and the posts were written for nobody other than myself.  This recipe was one of the first that came back to me after the email call to send your best.  

   My husband’s Aunt Dori sent this one and a beer bread recipe that we loved as well.  Little Dude was still just a tot at the time, sitting in a highchair.  

      So my post had a warning to spread the drop cloth under the highchair wide in case of spills.  I must have written the post before we ate, as he loved it so much that he was very careful to get every bit in his mouth!

    I made this again the other day.  We still love it. My husband even got a small bowl of the leftovers to eat at dinner the next day.  That is really saying something!  

     He isn’t normally a sweet person at all, and sweet sides really aren’t his thing.  So you know this is good.  I think it would be a festive and fun treat for your Christmastime dinners as well!

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