Artichoke Salad

Wow. It seems like I’d hardly gotten over being horrified by Barbecue Salad when I was faced with this fresh hell, dubbed by the General Foods Corporation as Artichoke Salad.

Mmm, this is a chunky one…

It’s a fairly simple recipe, consisting of artichoke hearts (Birds Eye frozen) and sliced mushrooms that are marinated in Four Seasons Italian salad dressing and then suspended in lime Jell-O with just the slightest whiff of added vinegar. No salt and pepper, I ask you. And some sliced pimentos to give it that festive look.

I have to admit, this recipe really played on my increasingly troublesome tendency to procrastinate. Normally I would do the cooking on a Saturday, and the tasting/video on Sunday, but I managed to futz around doing other things on Saturday last week (the guitar is always an awesome excuse not to do something else), made the Jell-O on Sunday, and recorded the video on Monday. The posting is due up today, per my editorial calendar, and I’m cutting this kind of fine. I still need to get in some guitar practice (damn you, F barre chord!) and I’d really like to spend some time in the Mojave Wasteland, where nobody has ever heard of Donald Trump.

I’m going to make this happen, though. I am determined.

The good thing about the procrastination is that I wound up marinating the artichoke hearts and mushroom slices for several hours, quite a bit more than the “at least one hour” recommended by the recipe. Both vegetables really needed it, the hearts because they were tough from the get-go, and the shrooms because, well, they’re shrooms. Beyond that, putting this all together was totally routine by now.

Adding the Good Seasons and mayo dressing makes this extra special…

The recipe helpfully suggests that the Italian dressing that gets drained off of the vegetables can be mixed with mayonnaise to make a dressing for the Jell-O salad. That sounded kind of nasty, so I went ahead and did that. To be honest, I think that actually it wouldn’t have been a bad dressing if the Good Seasons didn’t taste like it was full of stabilizers and way too much salt, but in its way it was a proper addition to this particular recipe.

I wasn’t expecting much of this one, and I was not disappointed. As I expected, the lime Jell-O was far too sweet, but at the same time some of the Italian dressing residue had mixed with it, so there was a confusing melange of flavors there. The artichoke hearts remained tough after all the time in the marinade, so after eating one from my serving that took a couple of minutes to chew properly, I didn’t go back for more. They did end up dyed green by the Jell-O, though, which was interesting to look at. I expected the mushrooms to be unpleasant, and they were. The pimentos added nothing to this dish. Add this one to the already rather full “WTF” file.

Most of this went down the garbage disposal (which needed a couple of days to thoroughly digest those artichoke hearts) so Action Against Hunger is going to be seeing another donation from me. This is such a weird way to do a little bit of good in this world…