The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #123: Summer Salad

 Howdy, Jigglers! I got too lucky last time I played Jell-O Roulette and got the Avocado Pie, which at least theoretically speaking is a dessert. This time, due to having some particular leftover vegetables after making a soup, I got to make Summer Salad.

Though it isn't the most appetizing-sounding of recipes, in a way I was excited for it. Out of all the "salad" recipes, this is the purest: a vegetable-flavored gelatin matrix mixed with a minimum of weird ingredients envelops salad vegetables. That's right: not salad vegetables and fish, or salad vegetables and fruit, or any other inexplicable combination. Just salad vegetables. The simplicity was refreshing, in theory.

Besides, it's summer! That means you have to make Summer Salad, right?

Anyway, as I said, I already had most of the ingredients on hand for this one, including enough celery that I decided to go ahead and puree a bunch of celery to express its juices to use with unflavored gelatin in place of the Salad Gelatin, which of course is no longer available (I wonder why...).  The only other change I made to the ingredients, though, was replacing the regular or onion salt with celery salt, just to punch up the celery-ness even more. Other than that, I made the recipe exactly as written.

May I take this opportunity to state that the photos of Jell-O salad molds in JOJ are definitely not to scale with the recipes as written? Case in point:

Honestly, this is one of the better-looking gelatin salads I've made, but it's not nearly as pretty as the picture. And I'm just now noticing that there are clearly green onion slivers in the photo, though they aren't in the recipe. Come on, General Foods!

The celery juice turned the whole thing slightly murky, but not too bad. Now, the taste of this salad was about as you would expect. It tastes of celery and cucumber with a little salt and vinegar. The green pepper flavor, which I usually find overpowering, was barely noticeable. The tomato, however, is a different story. I like tomatoes, but for some reason they just do not work in this salad. Maybe if I had gotten a less ripe or less flavorful tomato it actually would have been better, but the umami savoriness of the tomato mixed with the strong celery overtones was not a success.

I'm going to go ahead and call it: I would never serve the Summer Salad to anyone even though I didn't hate it. It's passable, but the same combination of vegetables served over, you know, some lettuce and salad dressing would be more palatable and wouldn't make people think I'm batty. General Foods, why did you insist on putting vegetables in Jell-O?

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #80: Avocado Pie

Howdy, Jigglers! It's time for another wild and woolly recipe from 1964 Jell-O-Land. Avocado Pie has been staring me in the face since I got Joys of Jell-O, and I've never known whether to be more exited or more scared for it. But now it's time to take an up-close-and-personal look at this beast because I finally made it.

 

This photo has never sufficiently illustrated what this pie is supposed to be. The recipe isn't much better:

As per usual, I swapped out some ingredients, in this case using unflavored gelatin and a few tablespoons of sugar in place of the Jell-O and quadrupling the quantity of lime juice. Everything else, though, was as indicated.

 

The method for making this lime-avocado-pineapple-cream cheese-whipped cream concoction is basically no different from the normal "make Jell-O, chill until thick, fold stuff into it" routine that 80% of these recipes follow, except for the mashing avocado and cream cheese part. The further I got into the process, though, the more it started occurring to me just how strange this combination of ingredients is. It's half everything tropical and half dairy, which is odd on its own, let alone considering that the avocado itself is a creamy ingredient. More on that later.

At the last moment I had the brilliant idea to add a drop of green food coloring because, even with half an avocado mashed up in it and a lot of lime juice, the pie mixture was basically still white--again, the sheer preponderance of dairy in this pie would make a Wisconsonian blush. However, since the mixture was also very thick, the food coloring didn't dissolve very well, though it managed to give the final product a slight green tinge.

Tastewise, the Avocado pie is...just as confusing as anticipated. It is extremely creamy and thick, but not very sweet at all, even with all that pineapple and pineapple juice in there, plus the added sugar and sugar I added to the whipped cream. It's also surprisingly dense considering the quantity of whipped cream in there. What probably isn't surprising is that the lime and pineapple flavors totally drown out the subtle avocado taste of this pie. Honestly, you would have the same pie if you took out the avocado, only it would look a little more sane. The overall package is more strange than anything, but it's certainly edible--just not immediately recognizeable as a dessert.

 

Over the course of a couple of days, though, the flavors in this pie melded together a little bit, creating something that wouldn't be totally out of place as a key lime cheesecake or something, which is a pie I would really like, I think. Doesn't need avocado or pineapple, though.

If you were wondering, as I was, if the gelatin would preserve the avocado over a long-ish period of time, the answer is kind of! I was delighted with how not-brown the avocado stayed over the three-and-a-half days I had it. The chunks on top got a little discolored, but not badly considering.

 

All that being said, while I cannot wholeheartedly endorse this recipe, I can commend its inventiveness. I never would have thought of putting avocado in a pie. However, I do have some suggestions for any hapless Jiggler hoping to make the world's best Avocado Pie:

1. Mash up all of your avocado into the mixture instead of leaving half of it in chunks

2. Eliminate the crushed pineapple, but instead use pineapple juice in place of all of the water

3. If you want to use food coloring, add it to the gelatin mixture as soon as it comes off of the heat

4. Add the zest of one lime to the avocado and cream cheese mixture

5. Make the pineapple garnish as pictured; I skipped this step and the pie looked very plain without it

 General Foods get an "Eh" for effort for this oddball recipe, but if you think about it, this kind of recipe is the reason we love vintage Jell-O in particular: it breaks all the molds!

;)