It’s the holiday season and that means that right now, somewhere deep in your refrigerator, you have a little storage container of cranberry relish hidden away, every day going a bit further back into the depths, quietly, so no one notices. In three months time, it will be a barely discernible chunk of something you may have to sniff at to figure out, before dumping it into the garbage. But not this year, not ever again.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of little storage containers filled with cranberry relish go missing in refrigerators worldwide, only to be found months later, much too late to save them. We must do our part to cherish and preserve our cranberry relish, to keep it from drifting back to the Place from Which Nothing Returns. The place where the lipstick your mother bought you stays, several shades too pink, that makes you look “so pretty.” The place where that fossilized bag of brown sugar lives, biding its time. The place where the diet tonic resides, in case your cousin visits, getting flatter by the day. Don’t let your cranberry relish become just another statistic.

Keep your relish close, grab some flatbread and give it the send off it deserves: right into your belly sandwiched between cream cheese and flatbread, pan toasted, and drizzled with pomegranate molasses, the nectar of the gods. If maple syrup should ever go extinct, well then, there’s pomegranate molasses, every bit as good and, in this recipe, even better than maple syrup. If you don’t believe me, try it.

Stay vigilant, cranberry lovers!

-Amy at Flatout