Another post with bad pictures, but I have to get rid of the backlog and I’m really not going to remake some of these so I can have better pictures.
The kids and I went to the grocery store and got a bunch of packets of Jello knowing that I would eventually need them. I had read through recipes and just got the things that I knew were popular flavors or things that I had seen. So in the cart went Cherry, Orange, and Lemon.
We can start to enumerate my mistakes here:
- Going to the grocery store with 3 children
- Not having a good list.
- Buying things because I would probably need them someday.
- Not menu planning properly.
- Not realizing that when the old recipes call for packets of Jello, they mean the small packages and not the big ones.
All of this is preparation for what happened next. I had my old camp friend and her family coming over for dinner. It was the first time she was seeing our new house, I had just started the idea for my blog and was excited about all of that. And so I planned a menu that involved only recipes from my collection. And what could be more representative of what I was trying to do than to make a Jell-O salad?
Looking through the ingredients I had in the house, I decided that Frosty Lime Salad sounded about perfect. Except I didn’t have lime Jell-O. I figured it wouldn’t matter that much if I substituted lemon. But then I made the mistake of mentioning that I made the substitution after talking about my intention was to follow the recipes exactly as written. And because I only had huge boxes of Jell-O, the recipe was doubled. I might have gotten teased a bit.
Frosty Lemon Salad is refreshing in a way you wouldn’t normally think of. Cucumbers fresh from our garden, and celery make a nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the pineapple. I did not serve with lettuce and cherries. The creamy layer was a bit loose, as you can see. No one complained that this was gross, so it must’ve been ok. (Mom just told me that it was Martin VanBuren and his set that coined the term O.K., who knew?)
I experimented with lacto-fermentation (I had one batch work and one that didn’t), I made a variety of pickles from one of my books. I experimented with adding a chunk of horseradish and some hot peppers in with the cucumbers. The hope was that somewhere along the way, I would find the pickle recipe that would make all other pickle recipes seem insignificant and like a waste of cucumbers.
You can get all fancy with these and use a crinkle cutter, but to get even slices, I usually use a mandoline. 
