Seasonal Fruit Salad

Remember that episode of the Simpsons where Bart starts singing 'you don't win friends with salad'? Well this recipe proves that wrong. Today was my office Christmas Pot Luck. I decided that nothing says work party like a boozey fruit salad. I started the prep on Tuesday night (2 days prior). What you do is you soak the sections of clementines in the booze overnight. But for me it was 2 nights. That made my clementines super-duper boozey. Now the booze that you're to soak these in is called Tuaca - that's not available in Ontario. Nigella seemed to know that this wasn't available all over the place because she suggests that if you can't get your hands on some Tuaca then you can use a mix of Brandy and Cointreau. Well, that wasn't working for me either as I'm too cheap to go buy more booze right now when, as I've mentioned before, we have crazy amounts of booze already. So I did some reading up on Tuaca. Seems this is a liqueur that originates from Tuscany and has vanilla and orange flavours. I have a large bottle of Grand Marnier in my stores and I also happened to have a vanilla bean on hand. So what I did was soak the clementines in Grand Marnier and a vanilla bean. Then this morning before work I took the Grand Marnier the citrus has been soaking in and added sugar (oranges removed) and brought to a boil. Here I will interject with a trick I picked up for all the North Americans driven crazy by not having caster sugar available to them. Just put some regular sugar in a food processor to make it a little more fine. - you're welcome.

So you boil your sugar and booze and then pour it back over the oranges and toss in pomegranate seeds. done.

At work this got rave reviews. The clementines were sooooo boozey. It was like doing a shot. The greatest was getting a new person to try some "fruit salad" and then watching their face as they bit into a mouth full of booze. It was hilarious. People's reactions were either "wooooohoooo!" or, a grimace followed by "That's gooooood!". It was always one or the other. Another person came over to me and said " Man, now this is what I'm talkin' about!!! This is a Christmas Party dish!"

This would also make a fantastic dessert salad. And I am highly recommending it.