This post begins a holiday series of posts that features Mexican influenced dishes for a slightly off-beat, yet still damn traditional, Thanksgiving fiesta!

I love the holidays. No… really. I. Love. The holidays. I mean, what’s better than the whole world cooking feast after feast and celebrating all that we’re thankful for and all of our loved ones. Did I mention the feasting?

This year for Thanksgiving T & I are going to be traveling up to San Francisco to share our holiday with some great friends, both new and old. The old being my hommie, Yvonne and her delightful sig other Drew; and the new being the utterly fabulous and f*cking hysterical food blogger, Leena & her hubby Adam. Now you know when you put two kickass food bloggers in charge of making a holiday meal something great is bound to happen. In this case, Leena threw out two suggestions. 1) a Mexican Themed holiday meal and 2)elevated spinoffs of holiday food. I promptly rejected option one since, well… I cook Mexican food all the time. Like every week.

Unforunately for Leena, she planted a seed in my brain about doing a Mexican holiday meal. That seed, mixed with the large container of homemade mole chillin in my freezer, sprung to life and thus we had a Mexican themed pre-holiday meal (where I didn’t have to make any gravy & used up my mole) with our awesome friends Nicole & Justin.

In my traditional lazy fashion let’s start things off with the easist dish at the party – the cranberry sauce! This element of holiday meals is soooo simple to prepare yet somehow people still reach for the canned version. We fused tradition cranberry sauce with some mexican flavors by adding in some pureed chipotle in adobo and cumin. I believe Tyler said something like “wow. that is an agressive cranberry sauce!” He then clarified that he meant spicy! I love spicy so of course I used 2 tbsp of chipotle but if you don’t like it that spicy just use one.