Virgin Recipe: Cool Coleslaw Salad
…And here we are, back to the nasty Jell-O. The good news is that we’re heading into the final countdown phase, and Cool Coleslaw Salad is the third-to-last of the savory Jell-O recipes!
I did have to drag myself back from the Mojave Wasteland to do this. I decided to start a new playthrough of Fallout: New Vegas last weekend, perhaps not the wisest decision, but my other distractions are starting to fail me. On the surface it seems kind of strange that a video game set in a dystopian alternate-timeline, post-nuclear-apocalypse future should be so soothing, but I’m starting to form theories about fight-or-flight and stress hormones. Maybe engaging in those imaginary fights allows for a release of stress that’s not possible in the real world, where all we can do is scan our Twitter feeds every morning hoping that World War III hasn’t begun. Also, I like the southwest desert a lot, the bleak beauty and the vast quietness of the landscape, which is captured really well in Fallout: New Vegas.
Another motley collection of ingredients…
So I ventured out of my motel room in Novac and into my kitchen to make Cool Coleslaw Salad. There isn’t actually a whole lot to say about this one. The base is lemon Jell-O, but otherwise it’s not so different from a standard, non-gelatinous coleslaw. In that sense, it’s a close cousin to Molded Potato Salad.
A single batch of lemon Jell-O is prepared with a little less cold water than usual, but with salt and vinegar added. A half-cup of mayonnaise and a half-cup of sour cream get blended into the Jell-O, along with a few tablespoons of prepared mustard and some finely-chopped onion. I chilled the resulting savory bavarian over an ice-water bath until it was thickened, and then added shredded cabbage (the recipe calls for three cups, but I probably added more), a few tablespoons of diced pimiento, and a quantity of chopped parsley that was probably more than the tablespoon specified in the recipe. It all chilled in a glass bowl in the fridge overnight, et voila! Cool Coleslaw Salad!
Cool Coleslaw Salad
All in all, I’m pretty happy about how it turned out. I’m glad I added extra cabbage, because I think if all the cabbage had been submerged in the gelatin that would have been kind of depressing. At least this looked like “a salad”, and to be honest, I think that visually, at least, it was not unappealing.
While I’m overall relieved to be done with these “sour cream and mayonnaise” recipes, I have to say that Cool Coleslaw Salad did not taste bad. It tasted like coleslaw. The onion and the mustard really cut into the sweetness of the lemon Jell-O, and the sour cream and mayonnaise mixture made sense, for once. The real problem with this dish was the mouthfeel. The combination of a crunchy vegetable and a creamy gelatin is just unpleasant.
For once, Bryan and I were entirely on the same page on a recipe. I gave him some to try, and he actually ate more than a forkful, agreeing that it tasted fine but just wasn’t very nice to eat. The garbage disposal got the bulk of it, so Action Against Hunger will be getting another donation.
Memory Lane: Chicken Mousse
I’m almost regretting doing a Memory Lane post today, because I am so hungry! I went to the gym a while ago and did some deadlifts, and came home to a house not only bereft of snacks but also down to the last four ounces of milk, so I couldn’t even have the big glass of chocolate milk with which I sometimes reward myself after dragging my substantial ass to the gym. Right now I feel like I’m so hungry I could even eat Chicken Mousse.
Chicken Mousse
But maybe that’s because I don’t remember it. I know I made it, because I have my notes, and a photo. Judging by my notes, I wonder if I don’t have some sort of psychological block about Chicken Mousse. Apparently, it was pretty bad. To start with, lemon Jell-O and cayenne pepper do not play well together. Somehow, this isn’t surprising, and yet there they are, both in the same recipe.
Chicken Mousse memories…
As you might have guessed from the name, or from the photo, Chicken Mousse is a bavarian type Jell-O dish. The creamy ingredients? Mayonnaise and Dream Whip. I used the Mixmaster Junior to blend them together, to avoid the danger of mayonnaise blobs. That was probably wise, but the combination of mayo and Dream Whip was, unsurprisingly, very nasty.
Finally, instead of real chicken I used some sort of mock chicken, as I was trying, during the first iteration of the Project, to adhere to my mostly vegetarian diet. The reason that I am no longer doing this is because the mock meat was always bad in these recipes, and Chicken Mousse was certainly no exception.
Nevertheless, in the end I decided that the recipe wouldn’t have been helped by using real chicken. I used too much cayenne, and that was the best part. While it was “so bad it cracks me up”, I was also a little annoyed that I was dirtying dishes to make it. We gave it four “nasties”, and it left me asking, “Oh, god, why…?”
It’s a question a lot of us have been asking ourselves lately.
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: 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: Barbecue Salad
So bad…
Back with another nasty one, I’m gratified to say that this is the worst one I’ve done in quite a while. Just when I thought I was getting used to the savory Jell-O recipes, this one surprised me with its extreme unpleasantness.
Barbecue Salad is a close relative to the first savory Jell-O I ever did, Molded Tomato Relish. The main difference between the two is that Molded Tomato Relish is made with stewed tomatoes, while Barbecue Salad is made with tomato sauce, and includes pepper along with salt and vinegar. Since it was the first, I remember Molded Tomato Relish pretty well, in particular the way Bryan and I tasted it simultaneously on a three-count, and after a few moments simultaneously burst out laughing over how weirdly bad it was.
Still, as regular readers know (and others can find out by perusing the links in the Table of Contents), there’s been a lot of water under that bridge. I really thought I was becoming inured to the weirder Jell-O, that the thrill was gone. But no. Glory hallelujah, Barbecue Salad is thoroughly, hilariously bad.
Barbecue Salad, with mayonnaise garnish
The key to the nastiness has got to be the tomato sauce. It’s not something we ever use at Freak Mountain, so I wasn’t familiar with the ingredient. We make our own pasta sauce (or, as my Italian-American in-laws call it, “gravy”) starting with crushed tomatoes, so there’s always some texture to it. Canned tomato sauce, it turns out, is a very smooth tomato purée. Mix it with gelatin and you end up with something that is creepily similar to the mayonnaise I used as garnish (as suggested in the book). The mouthfeel is distinctly slimy. I don’t mind mayonnaise, normally, but I would never eat it on its own by the forkful. Barbecue Salad has helped me to understand my friend F– who is repulsed by mayo.
For the vinegar, I chose apple cider vinegar, and I think that may have been a mistake, as it was probably too sweet. In hindsight, what this recipe needs is a serious hit of acidic flavor, and my old standby white vinegar would have served that purpose much better. As for the salt and pepper, they were both undetectable.
I’d like to know who was the sadist who came up with this recipe. He or she has a lot to answer for. As I was tasting this, I was reminded of the scene in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince where Harry and Dumbledore are retrieving the locket horcrux, and Harry has to force Dumbledore to drink all of the (really nasty) potion in the basin to get to the locket at the bottom. Three bites of Barbecue Salad and I was through. If there was a horcrux in there, I’m afraid Voldemort still stands a chance.
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.
Virgin Recipe: Jellied Salad Niçoise
Jellied Salad Niçoise
Did you miss me last week? No? Okay, but I missed you. I missed you so much, I made you this lovely Jellied Salad Niçoise.
It’s hard to imagine, but all of these things went into a single Jell-O recipe.
These savory Jell-O recipes keep disappointing me – not because they’re so bad, but because they’re not bad enough. Jellied Salad Niçoise had so much potential, and then failed to live up to it. Just look at the motley crew of ingredients I had to assemble for this. Anchovies! Mayonnaise! Italian dressing! The only way that this could come out was “badly”.
So I got stuck into preparing it, and this was possibly the most involved Jell-O recipe I’ve done so far. It took a good two hours to put together, much of which involved chopping vegetables, although it all started off with hard-boiling an egg.
Proof that I am not making this up…
Rather than describe the whole process, I’m just going to give you a picture of the recipe, straight out of the book. Even just reading it, it sounds kind of nuts.
The weirdest part is that it requires what I think of as “a single batch” (that is, a three-ounce box) of Jell-O, with less cold water than usual. It wasn’t enough to cover the solid ingredients in the mold, and I was sure that when I went to unmold it, the whole thing would fall apart and be a complete disaster. I was pretty excited by that prospect, because I thought it would make for some good video. It’s been too long since this blog has lived up to its true potential as a sort of culinary “Jackass”, and I was hopeful, but this surprised me. As you can see from the photo, Jellied Salad Niçoise unmolded unexpectedly well. I was sure that the loose bed of chopped lettuce at the bottom would make the whole thing unstable and lead to a collapse, but I suppose by now I should have more faith in the Jell-O.
For eating, it wasn’t very good, but it could have been worse. It turned out that one chopped up boiled egg wasn’t enough to stink up the whole dish, and even the anchovy-tinged mayonnaise was less repulsive than it could have been (unless, I suppose, you’re one of those people who just hate mayonnaise on principle).
Jellied Salad Niçoise Sans Jelly
While I was in the midst of making it, Bryan strolled into the kitchen and pointed out that, if not for the Jell-O, this wouldn’t be such a terrible recipe. Indeed, the Salad Niçoise didn’t look so bad in the mold before I poured Jell-O over it and piled on the chopped lettuce. Aside from leaving out the Jell-O, I would have preferred a simpler dressing, just some oil and vinegar with a little salt and pepper, which is what I generally prefer for salad dressing. We don’t use store-bought bottled dressings, which is why I used the Good Seasons.
Needless to say, Bryan and I didn’t eat more than one portion of Jellied Salad Niçoise, and the rest went straight into the garbage disposal. A donation is being made to Action Against Hunger to atone.
I’m trying not to go too heavy on the politics here, but I’m still resisting, and for the video I wore a “pussy hat” made by my friend Donna, who has an Etsy shop and has been doing a brisk business in pussy hats lately. (She also makes other kinds of hats, jewelry, accessories, and toys.) If you like it, please check out her shop, Via Donna, at https://www.etsy.com/shop/ViaDonna.
The New Joy of Jell-O Project 