Cookbook of the week: Hello, Jell-O!
Welcome to the first installment of "Cookbook of the Week," a potentially weekly series highlighting new releases.
There are certainly easier recipes in the book than the "Petite Watermelons," and Belanger's primary focus is not alcoholic Jell-O recipes (though she does devote one chapter, "Boozy Molds," to it). The "watermelon" recipe is actually from the "Americana and Other Favorites" chapter, which also includes Jell-O molds that riff on peanut-butter-and-jelly and New York–style cheesecake. From making these little guys I learned two things: (1) A recipe that includes the ingredient "limes, halved, pulp scooped out and discarded" is trying to hide from you the fact that you will actually need to devote precious years (read: half an hour) of your life to the excruciatingly mind-numbing process of cutting, with kitchen shears, the pulp out of limes; and (2) The key to Jell-O is time. These charmingly retro recipes take hour after hour to set, and in the case of the watermelons, they actually have to set twice. (I didn't budget nearly enough hours for this project, hence my not-quite-set shots pictured above.) Is this a cookbook for people with too much time on their hands? Yes. That's why I salute it.