Howdy, Jigglers! It had to happen sooner or later--sooner or later I had to make Vegetable Trio, a layered Jell-O mold flavored with salad Jell-O and full of raw vegetables. Oh joy.
In all reality, I don't even mind the idea overly much. I like carrots, cabbage, and spinach, and the layered look is aesthetically pleasing. Even so, I knew that encasing all of that in savory gelatin was just going to be weird. I certainly wasn't disappointed.
Since, as you may or may not be aware, Jell-O Salad Gelatin has not been available in around 50 years, I added a hefty sprinkle of celery salt and some unflavored gelatin in place the savory Jell-O mix and salt. In order to make a more flavorful salad, I substituted homemade chicken broth for both the boiling and cold water in the recipe. In addition, chives are not available where I live, so I used finely sliced green onion instead. For the rest, I followed the recipe exactly.
One mistake I made was to divide the gelatin into three evenly divided blobs before mixing in the vegetables. Since loaf pans are wider at the top than at the bottom, you need more gelatin for the spinach layer than for the cabbage layer, and more for the cabbage layer than for the carrot layer. This meant that though the carrot layer was thoroughly enclosed in gelatin, the spinach layer was not. The recipe, I believe, assumes that you will intuitively figure that out, and maybe a cleverer cook would, but I did not. Other than that, this is an easy recipe to follow.
Of course, since this recipe has a photographed featured in JOJ, I had the added pressure of trying to make the recipe look like the picture, as my husband is very adamant that I need to make at least one gelatin dish that looks like what the book shows. He was not satisfied with the bits of spinach and cabbage sticking out of the gelatin matrix. For my money, I think it's pretty close.
I sliced the cabbage very finely, because no one wants to eat large chunks of raw cabbage, but I wish I would have taken the time to truly mince it because the long slices made it messy to cut this bad boy. Honestly, though, this loaf of gelatinous veggie mass won't cut cleanly no matter what you do.
The taste is, well, very salad-y. I'm glad I went with chicken broth instead of water, as it makes everything more umami-y. The celery flavor doesn't stand out all that much, which is fine. The green onion is extremely strong, though, so I would halve the quantity of it in any future attempts (which aren't likely, even though this isn't a disaster). The overall effect is fine, but rather plain.
Getting back to that mistake I made, though: the spinach and green onion, as they weren't completely coated in gelatin, started to deteriorate after about three days, after which point I started removing them entirely. The cabbage and carrot layers, though, held up fine for almost a week. Of course, if you serve this at a party (like a weirdo) all at once, it doesn't matter much, but otherwise I strongly suggest either divvying up your gelatin unevenly, as I described above, or just increasing the amount of broth or water you use and increasing the amount of gelatin and flavoring proportionately. That way you have plenty of gelatin to get that spinach all buried in there where it will stay nicely preserved for much longer if necessary, and look much neater in any case.
Here's how I first served the Vegetable Trio: as a side salad to a soup-salad-sandwich lunch. The sandwich was a grilled cheese on homemade peasant bread, and the soup is regular tomato soup. Now, raw vegetables in cold, clammy, savory gelatin isn't quite as enticing as hot, salty soup or a cheesy fried sandwich, but it certainly added virtue. That's one thing I've got to hand to this recipe--it is exquisitely healthy. If you want to pack all kinds of veggie goodness into one loaf pan, this is the way to do it. I also do really appreciate the geometry of the loaf pan-shaped, rectangularly layered salad to the side of soup in a round bowl.
No comments:
Post a Comment