Which isn’t a good thing for tomatoes. I’ve never been much of a gardener, mind you. However I do know an authority when I see one: a little old Chinese lady I shop next to most Saturday mornings. This last week we were both salivating over pint containers of positively perfect little pear tomatoes. I […]
READ ONTry this jam. You’ll be amazed at what a fresh, ripe tomato can do in a sweet context. I need to underscore here that this is not a sweetened tomato sauce. It’s nothing like chili sauce, nothing like salsa, nothing like gazpacho. It’s everything like what it is: jam. The genius of great-grandma’s recipe is […]
READ ONBeing Scots-Irish I didn’t have an Italian grandmother. However I did have an adoptive one lent to me by neighbors; the grandmother of two boys who lived across the alley from the house I grew up in. Given that both of them had sandy blond hair and their last name was Aylesworth, they weren’t your […]
READ ONIn an ordinary year, I’d be posting heavily on things like fruit desserts and preserves about now. The trouble is there is virtually no local fruit to be had around Louisville this year. The spring frost that laid waste to the dogwood blooms just two weeks before the Derby also snuffed out all our fruit […]
READ ONThis is invaluable information for any creative JELL-O-er. The general rule of thumb is that pretty much any fresh fruit, save for a seedless grape, will float. Canned fruit packed in syrup – especially heavy syrup — will sink. Thus the rationale for making most ring-mold-type JELL-O masterpieces with canned fruit. A variety of interesting […]
READ ONI’d like a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man’s hat. Such is the bar order of a character, clearly meant to be Yoko Ono, in one of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons. That’s what this goofy flight of fancy reminds me of, even though that thing in suspension is actually a […]
READ ON…was what you might call a gelatin man. Very formal, he was the type of fellow who wore a jacket to dinner in his own house every night. He had a lot of rituals like that, one of which was a tall glass of thick, gelatinous beef consommé, which he drank over ice in the […]
READ ONNot from horse hooves if that was your answer. No, hooves don’t have any collagen in them to speak of. That myth originally arose from the days when gelatin was made from cow’s feet — waste items from rendering plants (glue factories). The stuff looked awful and smelled worse, or so I understand, which is […]
READ ONWell yes, in fact you probably can. Though it’d take a lot more experimentation (getting the right amount of gelatin in your juice and such). The great thing about JELL-O as I said is that it’s pre-formulated to a firmness that’s perfect for these sorts of shenanigans. Gelatin you see, comes in many different consistencies. […]
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