Heirloom Recipes #1: Strawberry Jell-O Cake

 Howdy, Jigglers! Today I'm starting a new series on the blog of old family Jell-O recipes, whether they're from my family or from someone I know. It seems like I have accumulated quite a few of these over the past six months or so, so I figured it's time to start sprinkling these into the Jell-O rotation (not that I don't love the upcoming JOJ recipes for my blogging efforts, like Ring Around the Tuna) for some variety.

To inaugurate the series, I am making a recipe that my mom apparently used to make a lot back in the good old days before I came around: Strawberry Jell-O Cake! No, it's not a cake. But it does have strawberry Jell-O, though. It is a nutty strawberry-banana fruit mixture in two layers of strawberry Jell-O with a layer of Cool Whip in between. For a less sweet variation, I have seen this same basic recipe posted around the Internets with straight sour cream in between the two gelatin layers instead of Cool Whip, but of course I wanted to try the recipe as written.

Now, since it was written in the 70s, package sizes and presentations of the various ingredients have changed between then and now, but you get enough to go on, certainly. What my mom left (perhaps intentionally) vague is how to mix all the ingredients together. I guess you could mix everything together in one layer, but research into similar Jell-O salads reveal that most people layer them.

The method for this Jell-O madness is simple and straightforward: mix your Jell-O and boiling water, cool until very thick, mix in the rest of the ingredients (I separated the gelatin into halves before mixing in the frozen strawberries so my top layer wouldn't set too soon), pour half into the pan, let set, put Cool Whip over it, then repeat the process for the first layer for the second one. I was planning on making a layer of half of my Cool Whip in the middle and then putting the rest on top, as my mom indicates in the recipe, but half the tub wasn't nearly enough Cool Whip to make a satisfactory or even noticeable layer in the middle, so I just spread it all on there. Even with all the Cool Whip spread on the first layer, I didn't feel like I had enough creamy goodness, so I spread on a little plain yogurt on top of it. If you really want Cool Whip on top, get two tubs.

The Jell-O layers turned out very chunky, but it just shows how bursting with fruit they are! 

The little sprinkly bits in the gelatin are the pecans--we could only find pecan bits and not chopped or halved or whole pecans, or else I would've made those a little chunkier too. 

I was pleased with the adherence of the Jell-O to the Cool Whip, since each slice of this "cake" held together pretty well.

 

 

Now that's a satisfactory and noticeable Cool Whip layer. This cake reminds me a lot of the Austrian and Peruvian flags. For all my Austrian and Peruvian readers out there, this would be a great dessert for any of your national holidays.

I know I always talking about serving Jell-O dishes at luncheons, but this time I really did serve the Strawberry Jell-O Cake at a luncheon with some friends and their kids, and everybody finished their servings, plus I even sent some second servings home with them. It was very tasty and cool on a toasty day, and the fruitiness of it mixed with all the creaminess in the center was delightful.

It was slightly concerning to see how much cake this recipe made considering the quantity of bananas in them, but the gelatin kept the nanners perfectly preserved for three or four days, so you've got time to finish this beast off, but I do recommend either serving it to a group or making it for a larger family or halving the recipe if you're not sure you can finish it right away.

If you're reading this, Mom, congrats! Your recipe got rave reviews! Even though I don't remember having eaten this as a kid, it still brings back that 70s nostalgia. I can taste the Watergate salad now (stay tuned...)

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #110: Ribbon Salad

Howdy, Jigglers! I'm following a short-term plan of what JOJ recipes to do next (I call it the Great Jiggle Forward), and the next one in line is a Two-Way Recipe called Ribbon Salad. This layered salad consists of a layer of lime Jell-O topped by a thick layer of lemon Jell-O mixed with pineapple, cream cheese, mayonnaise, and whipped cream (more about that in a moment), all of which is topped by a layer of raspberry Jell-O.

I suppose the only reason this recipe is considered a Two-Way is due to the inclusion of mayo. It's absurd to me to imagine this served as an actual salad on greens, as it is pictured, as it would be similar to slapping a scoop of strawberry ice cream onto a bed of greens and calling that a salad. I know Jell-O has always wanted to bill itself as a healthful, light food, but this is a deceitful way to do it.

For once, I made this recipe with the listed ingredients, as I didn't want to spend the cash and time on enough lemons, limes, and raspberry juice (assuming I could even find it) to flavor all three layers, although I certainly think it would be delightful if you did. Some yellow and green food coloring would come in handy for that to get the visual effect. However, as I didn't have crushed pineapple, I used chunk pineapple. As layered gelatin methods go, this one is a walk in the park. That didn't stop me from messing it up, though! I had gotten my egg beaters and whipping bowl in the freezer early so I would be ready to include the whipped cream in the lemon layer, but after mixing in the cream cheese and the mayonnaise, something in my brain went "that's enough creaminess" and I layered in the layer sans whipped goodness.

I only realized my error after the whole dish was set, at which point it was too late to go back and fix the mistake. Instead, I served the whipped cream (unsweetened, so as to moderate the strong Jell-O flavorings) on top of the salad.

As you can see, I didn't manage to get a single clear picture of Ribbon Salad in its pan. The lack of whipped cream made the middle layer thinner than intended, which led to the big chunks of pineapple sticking out through the top layer. *facepalm*

It still looks pretty similar to the illustration, though! I was generally pleased with the outcome. The taste was fairly strong, but with the creamy elements in the middle, its pungency was diluted somewhat. For those curious, no, you cannot distinguish the taste of mayonnaise amongst all the other flavors. I do believe this dish would have been better with the whipped cream mixed in, so it's not completely fair to judge the recipe given my mistake, but on the other hand, it wasn't promising enough to want to redo the whole thing right away. Maybe I will someday if I'm really bored.

 

The thing that stuck out to me the most here was that the recipe makes a full 13"x9" pan. Unlike most Jell-O recipes, which generally make a mold big enough to be a small side dish for a medium group, Ribbon Salad could be served at a large meeting. I cut my pan into 12 squares, but it could just as easily have made 16 or 20 pieces. For a fancy garnish, I would recommend fresh raspberries.

The other great use of Ribbon Salad would be any event dealing with Ghana or Bolivia, since the colors are so similar to their flags. Of course, if you rearrange the order of the layers, you could easily make other flag patterns.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #129: Vegetables in Sour Cream

Howdy, Jigglers! Since I had some sour cream left over from the last JOJ recipe I made, I decided to make another sour cream-based recipe with sour cream and Jell-O: Vegetables in Sour Cream. Did it sound like a good idea? No. Did that deter me? Not a chance.

While I was unable to find tarragon vinegar, I did find the last bottle of tarragon on the shelf, so I let some tarragon steep in regular white vinegar for three days ahead of when I was going to make the gelatin, which worked just fine. I'd never used tarragon before, but now I highly recommend it. It's slightly sweet and minty, but also savory and vegetal. I bet it would make an excellent vinegarette for a spring salad.

 

Anyway, I did make a few substitutions and alterations to the ingredients in order to make the best dish possible. Firstly, I used lime juice to flavor some unflavored gelatin instead of lime Jell-O (because the sweetness of Jell-O would be very bad in this recipe). Furthermore, I used a spoonful of chicken bouillon powder instead of bouillon cubes. I also halved the quantity of each vegetable because I've always found that using the full amount makes the vegetables stick out of the gelatin too much and crowd in together unpleasantly.

The method for crafting Vegetables in Sour Cream is as basic and simple as it gets. You put your gelatin and bouillon in water, you heat the water, you add the lime juice. Then you chill, stir in the vegetables, and pour into the mold. Chill again.

And the result is...actually really good. The vegetables go well together, they stay nice and crisp in the gelatin, it's a pretty salad mold, and the gelatin matrix has a wonderful depth of flavor, what with the savory bouillon, the tarragon vinegar, the lime juice, and the sour cream. It's tangy and savory and all-around nice.

I really must commend General Foods on this vegetable mix. You couldn't pay me to sub in peas and carrots like the recipe mentions. Cucumber, scallions, radish, celery, and green pepper make a perfect spring combination. I also like that all of the veggies are diced or thinly sliced. That makes the mold much easier to cut and serve cleanly, and honestly it makes it less messy to eat.

Now look at that interior shot and tell me that halving the amount of vegetables wasn't the right thing to do. Of course, one could just as well double the amount of all of the gelatin ingredients and keep the original vegetable amounts, which would make double the amount of your mold, but with a better ratio of gelatin to vegetable.

So, overall, this recipe was very impressive. Other than the changes I made, I wouldn't alter anything, and I honestly would serve it at a spring luncheon or Easter or at a picnic as an honest-to-goodness vegetable side dish that just happens to contain gelatin. I know it seems miraculous, but it's true. Another thing I found nice about this dish is that you can use the leftover vegetables to make a nice crudites tray. So good on you, General Foods, for making a savory vegetable mold recipe that I don't even think would be that out of place in a modern Food & Wine magazine or something.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #33: Sour Cream Dessert

Howdy, Jigglers! This week in Jell-O-Land, I wanted to make a smooth dessert recipe to try out a new mold I found in a classic pattern, and I landed on Sour Cream Dessert. While the inclusion of sour cream in a dessert might sound a little odd initially, it isn't unheard of. I think some cheesecakes use sour cream, and I know I've had sour cream fruit pies (which were delicious, as I recall).

Now this is a simple little gelatin number to make. I used unflavored gelatin instead of Jell-O and canned mango nectar instead of the water for a creamy tropical mold. Note: you can't get "light cream" in my neck of the woods, so I used heavy whipping cream (it's not a low-calorie dish, I can tell you that much). Maybe you would want to use half and half instead of heavy cream, but what I did certainly worked.

The mood lighting in this photo highlights just how beige this dessert turned out. It perfectly illustrates the nice new mold shape, though! The beigeness is due to a combination of the mango nectar and the artificial vanilla I used. The color, of course, will change depending on what you include as a fruit flavoring.

 

This is one creamy Jell-O dessert, which shouldn't be surprising considering that it's mostly dairy. All that creaminess and fat did drown out the mango flavor, though, and overall you only taste sweet dairy. Instead of slicing up a mango on top of the gelatin, which would also be great, I decided to make a mango nectar reduction sauce, since I had some of the nectar left over. I simmered a can of mango nectar with a quarter cup of sugar until it was well reduced. This sauce, when heated and poured over this gelatin, is AMAZING. It gels perfectly with the tangy hint of sour cream while being sweet and mangoey enough to taste like a slice of tropical heaven. The hot-cold contrast is also nice. It's a lot like serving flan with caramel sauce--you might not want to eat flan on its own, but with the sauce it's divine.

After filling my new mold, I had some gelatin mix left over, so I put it in an individual mold as well. Also pretty! I love how well it takes on the molds' shapes.

While slighly unconventional, Sour Cream Dessert is endlessly versatile. I can see where it would be delicious with some cherry juice in the mix and then topped with a cherry sauce, and it would be perfect with blueberries or blackberries too. Or gooseberries, anyone? Larger stone fruits like peaches and plums would even work. I might have to try this one again sometime with a different fruit combination and see what happens. Watch this space!

Anyway, thanks General Foods, for a somewhat bland recipe that you can whip up in a flash and use with nearly anything.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #119: Vegetable Trio

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.

And, of course, for all I'm complaining about it, Vegetable Trio is surprisingly edible. I ate it all (minus the spinach once it got some age on it). I can't even recommend against making it. If this is what you want, the recipe does what it says on the tin, so to speak. So congrats, General Foods, you exceeded my expectations by making a dish I truly feel neutral about.

"Gelatin" in the Wild: Jin Jin Passion Fruit Flavor Jelly

Howdy, Jigglers! I went to my local Asian grocery store recently, so you know what that means: a foodstuff similar to gelatin was to be had!

Now, I was not able to glean from the bag what the coagulating substance in Passion Fruit Flavor Jelly actually was, but I don't believe it was gelatin, as it was being kept at room temperature and the jelly was not liquified.

What I did clearly notice was a plethora of health and safety indications on the packaging, for example:

I was glad to see that this product is fully HACCP compliant. However, I was not so enthused by the following ominous warning:

Guess I've never seen a choking warning directed at the elderly before, but I suppose it makes sense. The prominence of the warning language is certainly offputting, though.

However, the jelly itself was firm, flavorful, and amazingly not weird at all. I quite like it, though I'm sure there are tons of preservatives in it that they should be warning you about. Maybe those warnings are in that other language that I can't read.

I'm usually not big on passionfruit-flavored items, but this has a bright, sweet flavor, almost citrusy but not quite, with a bold firm-set gelatin texture to go with it. I have thus far eaten these with a spoon and by squeezing it out of the cup (taking care to bite off a section and not swallow it whole, of course). And, to be fair, after having eaten it, I can understand both the temptation and the danger of swallowing it whole. These things are definitely big enough to clog up your throat. Regardless, I must say that Passion Fruit Flavor Jelly is the best jelly item I've picked up at the Asian grocer to date. Well done, Asia.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #112: Mint-Glazed Pears

Howdy, Jigglers! The next recipe from Joys of Jell-O on my list to make was Mint-Glazed Pears, which is a curious pairing of flavors, but I was hoping that it would turn out somewhat similar to the Cherry-Glazed Ham that I so dearly love (to date, it’s the only JOJ recipe I’ve made twice). I like mint, and I like pears, so even though General Foods clearly threw darts at a board to choose the flavor and the fruit to use in the recipe, how bad could it be?

 

The method is even similar to the one employed in Cherry-Glazed Ham: you make your gelatin solution, you pour it on the pears, then you stick it all in the oven, basting frequently, only this time we’re using the broiler instead of just roasting. I only had peppermint extract (though trust me, I’ve looked for regular mint extract around here for ages—I’m just not convinced it’s still made), but otherwise I used all the ingredients as called for in the recipe, even down to a packaged gelatin mix. This was mainly because I wanted the bright coloration, and every time I use green food coloring the result is just a little odd (see Avocado Pie).

 

Since you can serve the Mint-Glazed Pears warm or cold, and since you don’t have to wait for any gelatin to set, the first thing that struck me about this recipe is how fast it is. I had the whole thing done in half an hour, and that’s with attending to some other chores at the same time. You do have to be mindful of the broiler, though. I basted my pears every two minutes, and I got slight charring between 6 and 8 minutes in, so I didn’t end up broiling them more than 10 minutes in total. The charring as it turned out was fine, but I didn’t want to overdo it. I also had my oven rack very close to the broiler, though, so maybe if you put it on the second or third rung from the top, you would be able to broil for longer and get more infusion of the gelatin into the pears.

 

That’s what really makes this recipe shine: the pears absorb a lot of the gelatin mixture, making them bright green and full of flavor. They don’t taste like they have a glaze on them, as in a physical layer of gelatin on the outside (even when chilled), but they are quite minty and sweet. Not much of the lime flavor came through, surprisingly enough, as half a teaspoon of peppermint extract is a strong flavor to have to overcome.

 

What the recipe doesn’t really state, however, is that the amount of gelatin you make is easily enough to glaze three one-pound cans of halved pears. I didn’t think of this at the time, so I only used one can despite having three in my larders, instead molding and setting the rest of the gelatin (diluted with a touch of water). In retrospect, I wish I would’ve just kept glazing more pears, because the pears were much tastier than the minty lime gelatin by itself. Plus, the pears are fairly light as a dessert, so one can only yielded me three servings of three pear halves each. If I had made all three cans, I could’ve eaten Mint-Glazed Pears all week!

 

As far as the serving suggestion of serving hot and cold goes, I tried it both ways, and I have mixed feelings on the matter. I personally preferred these pears warm, but I feel like most people would enjoy them more served cold. In terms of when or where I would serve Mint-Glazed Pears, I would only recommend serving them to your more avant-garde or culinarily adventurous friends. Mint is a divisive flavor, and these pears are strongly minty, plus the toxic waste-green color on the pears might be offputting to people. The perfect occasion for these might be Easter brunch as a light fruit salad (it is in the Two-Way Recipe chapter, after all) or as a light picnic dessert. Since they are fairly durable, they would (and did, in my case) make a nice light dessert to stick in a lunchbox for work or school for a mint lover. A lot of Jell-O dishes get weepy when you store individual servings in your lunchbox for a while, but these stayed just as good as when they were freshly made.

 

I must commend General Foods’ work on this recipe: it’s a creative use of Jell-O, it’s interesting as a concept, and it’s delicious, a rare trifecta for the Joys of Jell-O. Now, I know from experience that they just got lucky with this particular combination of flavors and methods, but get lucky they did in this case. I’m sticking this one in my memory banks for future backyard barbeques and such, because even if no one else in attendance enjoys mint or unnaturally colorful fruit, I will happily scarf down any leftovers.