There's Always Room

I cooked yesterday. Actually what I did was boil water and pour it into a bowl with Jell-O powder and made flavored gelatin, after re-reading the boxes and realizing that I also had to add cold water to the bowl (since it looked really sketchy with just the powder dissolved in the hot water. Sort of like a wobbly black hole in terms of the amount of light. It looked a lot better with the additional water).

I would like to tell you it was delicious and it was, in its way. It was the most delicious gelatin I made yesterday which is as far as I can go in telling the story without damaging the truth. I worry about keeping my diabetes under control so I buy sugar-free gelatin powder, unless I get distracted by the box or the flavor on the box and then, when I'm putting the boxes away after taking them out of the grocery bag in our kitchen, I'll discover that I bought a mixture of sugar-free and not sugar free (which they do NOT call it on the box) gelatin powder.

That just means I have to pay (more) attention when I'm making it to always mix and match the two kinds which is pretty easy because, aside from the lapse in concentration at the store in buying the two different kinds, and later in the kitchen in getting a little confused about the amount of water to use, I'm practically a professional Jell-O maker.

Here's something you learn when you pick up the wrong kind of gelatin. The sugar-free kind weighs, the box says, point eight five grams-less than a feather (probably). The regular kind weights eighty-five grams, which is TEN times as much. You'd think that just picking up the boxes on the store shelf, it would be a simple matter to purchase the correct kind and since I have no counterpoint to that position, I'll ignore it.

I only made the Jell-O because I bought some yesterday afternoon in the store (this time I even got all sugar-free mixes; sometimes I amaze myself), and when I brought it back to the cart my wife reminded me 'we have Jell-O boxes in the kitchen cabinet'. I told her I knew that, which wasn't as true as it could have been, and that's when I decided to make Jell-O when I got home to prove to her I knew we had some. Showed her, I did.

I go for color more than actual flavors since I'm never especially comfortable with how they get the stuff to taste differently. I never buy orange because the color on the box is too weird and when you make it with other flavors, the colors are goofy. This time I made 'red' with, as I recall, some cherry and strawberry, or perhaps it was raspberry. And orange is the kind they gave me in the hospital when I had the Total Knee Replacmeent but it wasn't real Jell-O, it was another company's idea of what gelatin tasted like, except they obviously had never eaten gelatin, ever.

I've been known to make lime, but usually with strawberry-kiwi and I never buy, much less make, strawberry-banana, even though I really do believe they all taste about the same (just in case I'm wrong). I've never understood why there's no hurry to put it back in the refrigerator after you've made it and placed it in the refrigerator and 'let cool for about four hours' because it doesn't melt when it's on the counter, but when you add hot water to it, it does.

I was thinking you could actually get away with only ever buying one box of Jell-O and just keep adding cups of hot water as you'd eaten it and popping the bowl back into the fridge to regenerate.
I was going to seek a grant from the National Science Foundation or Bill Nye, since I figured we could feed starving people as long as we had drinking water and a fridge and then I remembered buying just one box of Jell-O wasn't the business plan for the people who make Jell-O and they'd go out of business and that would be the end of my idea. I've got a call in to Bill Cosby to see what he thinks. In the meantime, I have a smile--you can go buy the Coke.
-bill kenny