I have to confess. I have never cooked with cranberries! Okay, maybe dried cranberries, but never with fresh cranberries. My limited exposure to them has been dried in muffins or scones, and through cranberry sauce the one time a year we eat it. Other than that. Zip. I must also confess that the only time I have used dried cranberries is because I made a mistake while shopping for dried cherries.

About a week ago, Frugal Fritz decided to load cranberries into our grocery cart - whatever - they can sit in the bin with the turnip because I don't like cranberry sauce -- yeah, even the homemade version, which my Nanny made every Christmas. They just don't appeal to me, they look like something you were told not to eat off bushes when you were a kid. They look poisonous! Irrational fear or not, I never attempted to cook with them.

You are about to embark on a journey into my mind, it won't be pretty, it won't be sane, but it just might be entertaining enough for you to read on through to the end.

So today, with a beautiful 2 kg boneless pork loin roast in hand, I had to decide how I was going to make this different from all the other pork loin roasts I have prepared over the years. Scanning the fridge brought little inspiration. Eggplant, zucchini, sunchokes, carrots, tomatoes, celery - no, no, that's for the soup I want to make, no, no, no. In the drawer there were mushrooms, the turnip and the cranberries. What goes with pork, and mushrooms? Nuts? Nah. Turnip and Pork? Not wowing me. Cranberries and Pork? Okay, I have heard of people serving cranberry sauce with ham, and we use dried cranberries with pork loin. What goes with that? Orange juice, but I am not feeling that and I have none on hand. (note to self, add OJ to grocery list). Pineapple, that could be fun!

I love spicy food, and I love it when hot meets sweet. Like chili chocolate or spice cake. We had sweet covered with the pineapple. For pork a rub works best. I decided to put together a dry rub using chipotle, ancho and tumeric. I then roughly chopped up some garlic and ginger. The aroma of the mix of spices was exactly what I was hoping for. A little salt and pepper and it was ready for the slow-cooker.

I have to remember to wipe down the inside of the slow-cooker BEFORE taking pictures, but I was so excited by how this smelled that I couldn't help myself!

I have the slow-cooker set to high for 8 hours. Check back tonight to see how this turned out!

It is now 8:16PM and we already devoured our meal. The pork turned out quite nicely. The cranberries added a nice tartness to the meal and though Fritz was not impressed by the pineapple, I liked how they soaked up the flavor of the pork and spices. I think this would have been better if I had pre-cooked the cranberries just until they popped.

Overall, Fritz rated the dish an 8 of 10, noting that he liked everything except the pineapple. I, on the other hand, am a much more critical marker and rated this a 6-6.5, meaning, just a little above what I might have expected had I stuck to a more traditional recipe.