Episode 065 Simple Holiday Punch

Intro: Happy holidays everyone, and welcome to another episode of Let’s Make Dinner, your audio library of amazing dinner recipes you can always get on the table. I’m your host, Susie Weinrich.

Susie Weinrich: So today I’m just popping in real quick. We’re not making a dinner recipe. This is a little bonus episode. I am going through the full recipe to make a holiday punch. 

Tips and Tricks:It has flavors of pomegranate and orange and cranberry that pair perfectly either with a party or any type of holiday celebration. One of the bonuses of this recipe is that you can have it without alcohol or you can add alcohol. Now, if you have a group that’s mixed kids and adults, what I recommend doing is just putting the alcohol on the side and adults can pour in as much or as little as they want. Then the kids can drink straight from the punch bowl or the pitcher and be totally safe. 

Now, if you have a complete adult party and you know everybody is going to want to have cocktails, then I recommend pouring in one cup of either a white rum, silver tequila, a vodka, prosecco, mixing it in the punch, giving it a taste, and then adding more as you like. 

Holiday Punch Recipe: To make this punch recipe, you only need four ingredients, plus maybe a couple garnishes if you want to keep it really festive. All you need is four cups of cranberry juice and what I recommend here is buying, this is going to get confusing 100% juice, Cranberry juice. I’m emphasizing the word juice. The one that you don’t want to buy is a hundred percent pure cranberry juice. The 100% juice Cranberry juice is sweetened. It’s delicious. It’s not a cranberry juice cocktail. It’s exactly what you want. The hundred percent pure cranberry juice is that really tart, like burn your tongue cranberry juice. That’s not what you want. Okay, so make sure you get the right cranberry juice. You’re going to need four cups. 

Then you need three cups of OJ. I personally love a heavy pulp orange juice, but when you’re making it for a crowd, I recommend doing pulp free. Then you need two cups of pomegranate. and three cups of ginger ale. You can also sub like a Sprite or a seven up, any kind of lemon lime soda for the ginger ale. So all you do is pour all of that into a pitcher, give it a stir, and it’s ready to serve. 

If you want to make your punch before a party or before a dinner, you can mix the cranberry juice, the orange juice, and the pomegranate juice together, pop it in the fridge for a few hours, and then right before it’s time to serve, then pour in the bubbly, the ginger ale or the lemon lime soda. 

Some fun garnishes that you can think about for this punch are orange slices, pomegranate seeds, and fresh cranberries. You can even do slices of lime, so you have the red and the green for Christmas would all be beautiful. 

If you’ve got a lot of kids at your party, I also recommend maybe putting out a little bowl of maraschino cherries for the kids to put in their drinks and actually the adults are probably going to like that too, cause they’re delicious. If you have a really large crowd that you’re trying to serve this punch to, you can actually double or triple the recipe no problem at all. It will absolutely work. However, you will want to have an actual punch bowl that you’re going to serve it in. Let me tell you this little tip. You’re not opposed to going to thrift stores or going to estate sales, punch bowls and glasses are plenty at those locations, so there’s no reason to go out and buy something new and expensive to serve your punch in.

Another tip though, I will tell you this. So if you have a trifle bowl, that can absolutely work as a punch bowl. I actually have a cake stand from Pottery Barn that doubles as a punch bowl. It’s crazy. So the base gets turned upside down and the lid gets turned upside down and fits into the base. So see if you have one that will work like that too. 

All right, so that’s the full recipe for this holiday punch. I hope that you have a wonderful holiday season. As always, I will link all of the recipes that I talked about right in the show notes so you can make it, save it, find it when you’re ready to have this punch recipe.

Outro : Until next time, I hope this recipe makes your holiday time a little sweeter. See ya.