Strawberry Pretzel Salad

This is another dish I took to Millie's for Easter dinner. My big surprise was coming to this blog to look up the ingredients needed and realizing I've never written the recipe up on here. I've been making this for years and assumed that, at some point, I would've recorded it on my cooking blog but, for whatever reason, it's been left off - until now.

Salad is somewhat of a misnomer since this comes out tasting a whole lot like a dessert. However you want to classify it, I love the taste of this dish. It's one of those recipes you can google on the internet and come up with many sites where home cooks have written up their version of how it should be made but the recipe I've always used comes from my friend, Pam.


Strawberry Pretzel "Salad" (wink, wink)

Ingredients:
2 cups crushed pretzels (I put my pretzels in a gallon ziplock baggie and then use a rolling pin to crush them.)
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) melted butter
3 Tablespoons plus 3/4 cup sugar
8 oz. package cream cheese
8 oz. carton Cool Whip
2  3 oz. packages strawberry gelatin dessert mix (strawberry gelatin dessert mix? haha...JELLO!)
2 cups boiling water
2  10 oz. packages frozen strawberries
1 small can crushed pineapple

Directions:
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. For the crust, mix the pretzels, butter, and 3 tablespoons sugar. Press this mixture into a 9 x 13 pan. Bake for 7 minutes and set aside to cool. Beat together the cream cheese and 3/4 cup sugar. Fold in the Cool Whip and spread over the cooled crust. Refrigerate until well chilled. Dissolve the JELLO in the boiling water; cool slightly. Add the strawberries and pineapple, and pour over the cream cheese mixture. Refrigerate until serving time.

(I tried something new this time, with results still to be evaluated. We left Millie's with enough of the salad left over for Martin and I to have one future helping apiece. Using all my Emily Rules for Careful Freezing, I put those two portions in the freezer to see if they can be defrosted well at a later date. )