Virgin Recipe: Green Goddess Salad Bowl
I am not making this up…
As a recipe, Green Goddess Salad Bowl is literally dreadful, in that I was dreading making it. This one includes avocados, crab meat, and anchovies. I’m including a photo of the recipe in this post so that you know I’m not making this up – not, in any way, shape or form, an endorsement of it. I do not recommend attempting this.
The dread, as it turned out, was well founded. The Jell-O component smelled foul while it was hot, and only slightly less so once it was firm. The color was a rather nasty mint green that clashed with the other green ingredients.
I had a fair amount of trouble on account of the ingredients, in particular the avocados. Since I’m not a hipster, I almost never eat or cook with avocados, and I was not up to the challenge of picking out ripe ones. I bought two, and one of them was so underripe and tough that I risked serious injury in separating the flesh from the pit. It was tough to cut, and tough to eat. The other one wasn’t as bad, but I had hoped to have at least a couple of decent avocados that I could salvage from the salad and turn into guacamole. I even bought a bag of lime tortilla chips, to which I turned for consolation at the conclusion of this recipe, sans guacamole.
Green Goddess Salad Bowl, circa 1974
The crab meat was another puzzle. That’s another thing I seldom eat and never buy. When I was growing up, crustacean shellfish (crab, lobster, shrimp) were somewhat luxurious, and I just never acquired a taste for them. I was warned by a couple of people that crab meat is really expensive – and, indeed, real crab meat from the seafood counter is expensive. Luckily, the recipe calls for canned crab meat, which is much more reasonably priced, but there I was flummoxed by the three or four varieties. The most expensive is “lump” crab meat, and I probably should have gone for that, but “lump” just sounds unpleasant, so I got a couple of cans of the “fancy white”, which sounds much nicer. It turned out to be perhaps more suitable for making crab cakes. Live and learn…
Since a lot of the work of making this dish is in the assembly just before serving, I decided that I would save some time by making a “making of…” video rather than doing my face and hair, preparing the salad, and recording a whole separate video of me tasting it. (Also, frankly, I get tired of looking at my dopey face.) The results are mixed. I got Bryan to do the tasting for the video, and although he makes much better ugly faces than I do, he tasted that Jell-O with remarkable equanimity. It kind of psyched me into thinking that it wasn’t that bad. The first bite I tasted, which didn’t have a significant amount of anchovy in it, was on par with some of the nastier dishes I’ve made, so I tried another bite, with more anchovies. That one was so disgusting it made me gag, and I turned right around and spat it out into the sink. This was the first time in the Project that I’ve ever had to spit out a bite.
This sums it up nicely…
A few minutes later, I was ready to dump the whole thing down the garbage disposal, but when I switched it on, the garbage disposal made a feeble sounding whir and stopped dead. We’ve been living in this house for eight years and the garbage disposal has never failed before – but at the prospect of taking in Green Goddess Salad Bowl, it refused.
I think it’s safe to say this is the worst one yet.
This time around, to help out with the Harvey recovery in southeast Texas, a donation will be made to the Houston Food Bank.
Virgin Recipe: Fresh Fruit Salad
Fresh Fruit Salad comes around in an interesting confluence of events. It happens to be an Orange Boycott recipe (I substituted lime Jell-O for orange) on a weekend when I wound up going to a counter-protest at the Boston Common to oppose a so-called “free speech rally” organized by some right-wingers who evidently felt that this was a good thing to do even so soon after Charlottesville. Planning for this rally had been underway since before violence erupted in Charlottesville, VA last weekend in the wake of a “Unite the Right” demonstration that included out-and-proud white supremacists and neo-Nazis. While smarter people might have at least postponed a rally that was planned to include many speakers who had appeared in Charlottesville, Boston Free Speech decided to go ahead with it.
The thing is, counter-protests mobilized pretty quickly, and the permit that was granted to Boston Free Speech mid-week required that they not carry weapons, or anything that could be used as a weapon (such as poles for flags). The organizers had to ask possible attendees not to bring neo-Nazi and Confederate paraphernalia (for appearances’ sake). Meanwhile, scheduled speakers were being uninvited (the most controversial ones) or dropping out. I guess not being allowed guns or swastikas made the whole thing not much fun for potential participants, and a few dozen rally-goers hung in there for less than an hour before being escorted away from the Common by police (for their own safety).
A large brass frog, Your Humble Narrator, and my weak selfie game – do I look like a radical to you?
Bryan and I were running late, and ended up getting to the Common a short while after the rally-goers had left. The counter-protesters were carrying on with a sort of impromptu peace rally, which was upbeat and jubilant. There was a bunch of bicycle cops in the buffer zone looking bored, and beyond the buffer zone an empty space around the empty bandstand. We wandered around for a while, and the worst thing I witnessed personally was a guy letting his dog paddle around in the Frog Pond right in front of a sign saying that this was not allowed. I know there were some altercations that happened after we left, but no one was seriously hurt and the number of arrests was somewhere between “the Red Sox won a home game” and St. Patrick’s Day. I left the house expecting to fight Nazis and wound up just taking a long walk on a brilliant summer afternoon.
Does this look appetizing to you?
And then I returned home to another Jell-O recipe. Fresh Fruit Salad is, I would say, a variant on Waldorf salad. Chopped apples, halved grapes (dammit, fussing around with grapes again!) and chopped pecans get mixed into a bavarian made with lemon Jell-O, two-thirds cup sour cream, and one-third cup mayonnaise. (I know that one reader has a photo of someone vomiting copiously that he keeps for occasions like this.) This gets molded with plain gelatin (orange in the recipe, lime in my case) on the bottom and top, so that it looks more appetizing.
Preparing this was fairly routine, though I was annoyed by the timing of it. I had to leave the bavarian part in the fridge for a while, longer than it would take me to do the washing up and make the plain Jell-O, so I had to just wait around. It ended up thickening more quickly than I’d expected, so I ended up having to leave it out on the counter while I prepared the lime Jell-O. With the lime, I had to put some of it in the bottom of the mold and chill until thickened but not set (a half-hour, per the recipe), and then thicken the remaining Jell-O, spoon the bavarian into the mold, and put the rest of the Jell-O on top. I admit it, I got impatient with the first lime layer, as you can see in the photo. Time management has been a challenge for me lately, anyway, and this recipe made me feel especially inadequate.
Fresh Fruit Salad
I left the unmolding and tasting until after I’d gotten back from the gym today, so that I would be hungry and this recipe would stand the best possible chance to be appetizing. I have to say it didn’t look too bad once I’d unmolded it, and frankly, I think lime was a better choice than orange anyway.
“This is the last time we hire a caterer from Minnesota!”
Unfortunately, for eating it wasn’t so nice. I didn’t think it was all that bad, even though the mayonnaise flavor really predominated in the bavarian layer, but that may have been the post-gym hunger talking. I still think nuts don’t belong in Jell-O. Bryan, on the other hand, described it as “really unpleasant”, and actually picked all of the bits of fruit out of the bavarian layer and ate what he could of the lime Jell-O, leaving a nasty heap of bavarian-style jelly in his bowl.
Fresh Fruit Salad appears in a photo in the book – on a wedding buffet table where all the dishes are made with Jell-O, also featuring Salmon Dill Mousse and Creamy Bleu Cheese Salad. I feel bad for the happy couple. If it was the mother of the bride who planned this wedding, that groom is in for a bad time with his mother-in-law.
Virgin Recipe: Artichoke Salad
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…
Virgin Recipe: Under-the-Sea Pear Salad
Under-the-Sea Pear Salad, circa 1974
Under-the-Sea Pear Salad is kind of a weird-looking and weird-sounding recipe that I considered including with the savory recipes, mainly because of the cream cheese, and because of the way it looks in the photo in the book. Also, “Under-the-Sea” seems to suggest that there might be shrimp in it (and we already know that NJoJ is not above such things). Something about it scared me.
Let’s face it, the “Under-the-Sea” part of the name is enigmatic. What does it mean? Is the lime Jell-O top layer supposed to represent the ocean? And why are there pear bits under it? I feel like this whole thing is more of a metaphor than a dessert – but a metaphor for what?
Despite all the deep thinking this recipe engendered, the preparation was fairly straightforward, although there were the usual 43-years-on hiccups. While the recipe calls for a 16-ounce can of pear halves, such cans are now 15 ounces. (I bought an additional 8.5-ounce can so that I could add a little more fruit. Most of the pear halves got chopped up into coarse chunks first and stowed in the fridge.) The recipe also calls for two three-ounce packages of cream cheese, which just sounds weird to me, because for as long as I can remember cream cheese has typically been available in eight-ounce blocks. (I bought one of those and measured out six ounces on the kitchen scale, no biggie.)
The base of Under-the-Sea Pear Salad is a single batch of lime Jell-O, to which a little salt and lemon juice are added. Instead of cold water, 3/4 cup of juice from the canned pears is used. I set aside about a half-cup of the liquid gelatin, thickened the rest over an ice water bath, put it in the mold to form the top layer, and put that in the fridge to firm up a bit more while I dealt with the cream cheese layer.
That was a little trickier. The cream cheese is supposed to be softened and “creamy”, but even though it was quite warm yesterday, the cream cheese didn’t get very soft after sitting out for a while. I tried beating it with a wooden spoon, but it remained defiant. There was only one thing for it. I put it in the stand mixer and gave it the cheesecake treatment. After beating it as well as I could with a power tool, I added the liquid gelatin and beat it some more, pausing a few times to scrape down the sides of the bowl while hoping that all those little lumps of cream cheese would get thoroughly incorporated into the gelatin.
Mercifully, the mixture did eventually homogenize, and then I added the now-cold pear chunks, which helped thicken the cream cheese/gelatin mixture and made it easier to spoon it over the barely-firm jelly layer. A good long overnight chill yielded this:
Under-the-Sea Pear Salad á la Freak Mountain
I’m pretty happy with the way this turned out, appearance-wise. It came out of the mold easily, and the canned pear halves turned out to be just the right size for a garnish on top of the mold. I don’t imagine this looked particularly appetizing to Bryan, but I like the dark and light green layers, and it did look appetizing to me.
For eating, this turned out to be a lot better than it sounded just from reading the recipe. Lime is still my favorite flavor of Jell-O, so it had that going for it at the outset. Not a lot of the recipes in the book include pears, so those made a nice change.
I didn’t love the cream cheese layer. The main reason I can think of is that tangy, cheesy flavor didn’t go all that well with the Jell-O, which is odd because the usual bavarians with whipped toppings tend to be too sweet. I almost forgot to mention that the cream cheese layer was flavored with an eight of a teaspoon of powered ginger, or I should say “supposed to be flavored”, because although I used more like 3/16 teaspoon, the ginger was barely detectable as a faint aftertaste. Maybe. Some diced crystallized ginger would have been better.
Finally, the texture of the cream cheese was possibly a little too thick. After Bryan finished eating his portion, he was licking his lips and his palate like a dog that’s been given a spoonful of peanut butter. Not a good look.
Okay, this is pretty obvious but you know I had to include it…
Recipe Repost: Grasshopper Dessert
Originally posted October 25, 2009
Grasshopper Dessert circa 1974
I have a vague recollection of grasshopper desserts from my youth. Pies, usually, with chocolate crusts. They were pale green and minty, and the grownups seemed to like them because they had crème de menthe in them, which gave them a little bit of a kick.
This Grasshopper Dessert bears little resemblance to those, apart from the hue. The base is lime Jell-O – yes, this is another one of those lime-mint blends. However, since this is a “centerpiece dessert,” it contains two packets (six ounces) of Jell-O, and for some reason the amount of crème de menthe is the same as in the one-packet Quick Crème de Menthe Frappé. While two tablespoonsful of crème de menthe stands out in two cups of lime Jell-O, in four cups it seems to blend in rather nicely.
The light green tower in the middle of the dish is part of the Jell-O mixed into two cups of prepared Dream Whip. I have to say I was underwhelmed by the Dream Whip. I don’t really understand the concept. You add milk and vanilla extract to a packet of powder and whip it up with an electric mixer. It’s no easier, or more convenient, than whipping real cream. It’s not dairy-free, nonfat, or anything like that – so what’s the point? Worse, the stuff tastes like vanilla frosting out of a can. Cool Whip is actually less nasty.
Grasshopper Dessert á la Freak Mountain, 2009
On the plus side, I finally got a chance to use the technique for Cubed Gelatin again. (That was sarcasm, in case you missed it.) I did really like the color of this, the dark, rich green cubes glittering around the sides with the creamy green at the center. You have to give Jell-O credit, when you do it right it’s definitely pleasing to the eye. Overall, this one was really okay, though I have to add a nasty for the Dream Whip.
This recipe does make a fairly large quantity of Jell-O, and I was wondering how we were going to eat it all. Then on Tuesday night there was a little dinnertime meltdown, and I ended up eating all the leftovers for supper. I can now report that it is, in fact, possible to get full from eating Jell-O. Also, (and I mention this only because I know you’re wondering,) if you eat enough lime Jell-O, you will poop green.
Virgin Recipe: Molded Vegetable Relish
Why did this take me so long?
It feels like ages since I did a nasty Jell-O, but it’s only been a couple of months. I’ve been having a weird relationship with time lately. On the one hand, time in the Trump regime goes by slowly, what with all the drama and “bombshell” news. It’s hard to believe it’s only been four months since the inauguration. On the other hand, on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour basis, time slips through my hands like water as I try to get done everything I want to do (work, gym, spending time with spouse and cats, Jell-O, guitar, Fallout…) but somehow I get sucked into the interwebs or old movies on TCM instead. Time has been almost unmanageable, for me at least. Still, I’ve managed to do Molded Vegetable Relish for you.
This is one of those Jell-O molds that strike fear in the hearts of random people on the internet. Oh no! Lime Jell-O with vegetables in it! The horror! But I’ve grown numb to it, and anyway, Molded Vegetable Relish couldn’t be as bad as the last couple of weeks have been for the U.S.
For my Molded Vegetable Relish – chopped cabbage, chopped celery, chopped pickle, and sliced martini olives
Molded Vegetable Relish gives the cook the option of choosing from six different vegetable combinations: 1) cabbage, celery, carrots, and green pepper; 2) cabbage, celery, green pepper, and pimiento; 3) cabbage, celery, pickle, and pimiento; 4) cooked peas, diced celery, and cabbage; 5) cabbage and sliced stuffed olives; or 6) carrots and green pepper. (I’m sensing a theme here…) To make this as repellent as possible, I went for door number three, except that instead of pimientos I used martini olives for maximum nastiness. The recipe is non-specific about the type of pickles, so I used what we had in the fridge, Grillo’s Italian dill slices. So, yes, what we’re talking about here is lime Jell-O with cabbage, celery, chopped dill pickle, and sliced stuffed olives that have been marinating in vermouth.
I have learned that, for the viewers, the most interesting bits of my videos are the ones where I make “yuck faces” as I taste the Jell-O, and I aim to please.
As far as preparation goes, the lime Jell-O gets made more or less in the usual way, a single batch (3-oz. packet) with 3/4 cup cold water instead of a full cup, with the addition of vinegar, salt, pepper, and grated onion. I found myself in the weird position of feeling as though I hadn’t added enough onion to my Jell-O (and that just ain’t right…) After thickening (over an ice water bath), the chopped veggies are mixed in and the whole mess is put into a mold and stuck into the fridge to firm up.
Molded Vegetable Relish in all its glory
The result was a bright-green mold, the color possibly enhanced by the almost-monochrome solid ingredients. It was certainly visually striking. It almost didn’t look like food. (Almost?)
This was not the worst Jell-O recipe I’ve done, but it definitely wasn’t good. To start with, there really wasn’t enough onion in it. I’m not sure if more would have helped, though. Between the salt and pepper and vinegar, and the salty, vinegary pickles and olives, there should have been enough savory flavoring in this, but all of that just could not cut the sweetness of the lime Jell-O. Instead, the flavors clashed in a rather aggressive way.
As Bryan noted, at least it didn’t have mayonnaise in it.
I took pleasure in shoving most of this down the garbage disposal, so Action Against Hunger is definitely getting a piece of this action.
Recipe Reboot: Chiffon Marble
Chiffon Marble circa 1974
It’s just as well that Chiffon Marble is a reboot, because I honestly have no recollection of having made it, ever. That’s not surprising, because it’s one of the simpler recipes in the book, in the “Nice Easy Things to Do with Jell-O” chapter.
The timing on this wasn’t great. I made it last weekend, while spontaneous protests were springing up in airports around the country in response to the executive order banning people from seven Middle Eastern and north African countries from traveling to the U.S. I was with them in spirit, after having spent the latter part of the week lending a sympathetic ear to the foreign nationals in the lab (including one individual from one of the named countries) who are anxious about the order, and increasingly disappointed in the U.S. It’s touching to know that they share our ideals and that they see this country as a source of inspiration as well as opportunity, which makes it that much harder to see how we’re letting them down.
Yes, this is really all there is to it
So it would have been nice to get stuck into one of the more elaborate Jell-O creations, something to take my mind off of things for a little while. Instead, what popped up on the editorial calendar was Chiffon Marble, which contains a grand total of four ingredients – and that’s including boiling water and ice cubes. Still, it felt good to crank up my Galaxy News Radio station on Pandora (which I couldn’t access in London) and do a little “cooking”.
One mildly interesting thing is that this recipe calls for the Jell-O to be quick-thickened with ice cubes, so I went ahead and did that, and it worked – so I guess the kitchen was just chilly enough. (Great.) After the Jell-O was thickened, I set aside 3/4 of a cup of it and folded about a cup (half of a prepared envelope) of Dream Whip into the remainder. The idea, then, was that the bavarian part and the plain Jell-O part should be layered and then swirled around a bit with a knife to a achieve a marbled effect. It sounds fine in theory, but it turned out that the plain Jell-O was denser than the bavarian part, so it just sank into the middle of the bavarian. Swirling didn’t seem to help much. Clearly there was some sort of trickery involved in the photo from the book, because this is how mine turned out:
Chiffon Marble á la Freak Mountain
On the plus side, there was leftover Dream Whip for garnish, and lime is one of the nicer flavors of Jell-O, so it wasn’t hard to eat it all.
I have to say, too, that making Jell-O is not such a terrible coping strategy…
The New Joy of Jell-O Project 