Category Archives: food and cooking

Jello is so refreshing.

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When I was a child, a leafy-green salad was prepared almost every evening of the year, including on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Our custom was to eat our salad after the main course, but on many holidays the healthy bowlful was discovered too late, waiting forgotten on the kitchen counter, long after anyone had any appetite left.

GJ preparing heavy dishes

My husband’s family introduced me to the tradition of jello at Thanksgiving. My mother-in-law had a nice strawberry jello salad that our whole family came to appreciate because it was one item on the heavy-laden table that wasn’t calorie-dense and fat-heavy.

Over the decades since then we’ve had a variety of lighter dishes on our table for these feasts, including Korean Kale Salad and other salads that may seem odd to the typical palate but keep us feeling like our usual happy Glad folk. For many years we let the jello custom lapse, probably because it was too sweet, and we didn’t need another item that seemed to belong in the dessert category.

When half my life was past I discovered that I did love grapefruit after all, and I experimented with creating a gelatin salad recipe that would be less sweet, and would feature the refreshingly bitter-sour tang of grapefruit. I love grapefruit even more after having lived in Turkey briefly, where they spell it greypfrut. But I didn’t eat any jello there, so that is just name-dropping — even though as you can see the Turks did not drop the name when they were changing the spelling.


Here now is the current version of my gelatin salad. I have played around with it over the years, using coconut milk and pineapple juice at times, making a smaller batch, and adding fresh peeled orange sections when I had them. So it is definitely flexible  — try it with your own preferred flavors or handy ingredients.

Grapefruit Gelatin Salad

64 oz. Ocean Spray Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice Drink
7 envelopes unflavored gelatin granules
1 qt. L&A or any pineapple-coconut juice
1 cup sugar
peeled fresh orange sections or a large can crushed pineapple

Put about 6 cups of the Ruby Red in a pot and whisk in the gelatin. Heat these together until the gelatin is dissolved. Add and dissolve the sugar, remove from heat and add the remainder of the Ruby Red along with the pineapple-coconut juice.

Refrigerate the gelatin until partly jelled. Stir in the fruit and refrigerate again until firm. I think next time I will put some sweetened flaked coconut on the top.

About the size of the pan: The one I use holds more than 3 quarts, and this salad after the fruit is added comes right to the top. It would be easier and maybe prettier to use a jello mold or fluted pan(s); then when the fruit has been mixed in I could prepare the pans by putting some shredded coconut and even a few maraschino cherries before adding the gelatin-fruit mixture.

I’d very much like to hear from any of you who also have favorite salad or vegetable dishes that lighten up your holiday menus. Leave a comment or link me to your blog. Thanks in advance! Oh, and if you just have jello stories, as I do, please tell me those, too.

I rescue cookies.

Christmas, food and cooking

At the beginning of November I had a cookie craving, and it occurred to me that I might as well make one of our favorite kinds of Christmas cookies; I could eat a few and freeze most of them, and be ahead of the to-do list. Our family’s holiday traditions include platters piled with various kinds of cookies, most of which won’t be seen again until the next Christmas. For this first session of baking I chose the soft Ginger Spice Cookies that feature an intoxicating combination of spices and diced candied ginger as well.

Something went wrong, or maybe a few things. I had made a note on the recipe card suggesting that I cut the sugar back another 1/4 cup from the previous alteration, because, “they are plenty sweet.” I am reminded of the story about the farmer who discovered he could add some sawdust to his horse’s feed and save money that way. He kept adding more and more sawdust and the horse seemed to do fine with it, until one day it died.

The recipe must have been just about perfect before I changed it just a little, and then the cookies came out terrible. Was it only the lack of sweetness that made them taste strongly of baking soda with pockets of overwhelming clove flavor? Or perhaps I hadn’t mixed the dough enough? I thought I would have to throw them out.

But wait – couldn’t they be used for something? If I dried them in the oven, and ground them finely in the food processor, I could use them as the basis for different cookies….so I tried just that. To the fine crumbs I added a cube of butter, an egg, and extra sugar and flour. A little more ground ginger and a tiny bit of cardamom. Then instead of dropping the dough by teaspoonfuls I chilled and rolled it, into trees. Now we have crisp gingerbread cookies that surprise the eater with an occasional tiny piece of candied ginger, and that warm your mouth with an even more complex and winning flavor. Alas, never to be duplicated.

This made me brave enough to tackle the other failed cookie product that had been sitting in the freezer for awhile, since the time I made some Russian Tea Cakes but only put in half as much flour as they needed. The buttery, pecan-studded cookie crumbs I had stuck in a jar in the freezer, being unwilling at the time to give up on them.

Now I dug them out and experimented in a similar way, adding an egg, sugar, flour, baking powder and lemon zest. I tried to roll this dough, too, but it would not hold together, so I shaped disks and stuck a pecan half on each one. Behold! Another new and non-repeatable Glad Christmas cookie, which the man of the house has tasted and approved. I do hope nonetheless that I can avoid making a yearly tradition of the Cookie Rescue.

If you need a vegan pie crust…

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Pineapple-Coconut Pie

In the course of telling about various pies over the years, I’ve mentioned this versatile pie crust recipe which can easily be made vegan, and is mixed up right in the pie plate.

I thought I had never given the recipe for it, but just today I saw that it was featured in the second post I ever wrote, in which I report on my experiment with sweet potato pie. I’ve now put it conveniently where it ought to have been all along, on the page titled “Recipes and Vague Instructions.”

In the Orthodox Church we have a good many days all throughout the year when we fast from dairy and eggs, those go-to ingredients for many desserts, so I’ve made use of this recipe on special occasions that also happen to be fast days.

Sweet Potato Pie with Black Bean Crust

An example is the pineapple-coconut pie which I mention on a rambling post that offers vague instructions indeed. But the crust recipe comes originally from the Amish, who aren’t known for fasting or eating vegan, and it’s a wonderfully quick shell to throw together even for a rich pie, like the colorful first one I ever blogged upon.

Since my last detailed pie recipe here, I have acquired a convection oven, and I want you to know that I no longer have to do the foil collar thing to keep my crusts from over-browning. Now it is easier (what?) than ever to whip up a pie, any day of the year.

As the Nativity Fast is soon upon us, any pie I make will likely be a vegan one using this recipe, which I am giving in the original Amish version with my notes. Finally, what you’ve all been waiting for… back for a second appearance… TA DA!

Pat-in-Pan Pie Crust
Single-crust 8-9” pie
Quick, crisp, but tender
(can’t be rolled)

1 ½ cups plus 3 tablespoons flour (does not have to be wheat)
1 ½ teaspoons sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup vegetable oil (you might even try a little butter!)
3 tablespoons cold milk (dairy, soy, nut, etc.)

Place the flour, sugar, and salt in a pie pan and mix with your fingers until blended. In a measuring cup beat the oil and milk with a fork until creamy. Pour liquid all at once over the flour mixture. Mix with the fork until completely moistened. Pat the dough with your fingers, first up the sides of the plate, then across the bottom. Flute the edges.

Shell is now ready to be filled. If you are preparing a shell to fill later, or your recipe requires a pre-baked crust, preheat oven to 425°. Prick the surface of the pastry with a fork and bake 15 minutes, checking often, and pricking more if needed.


For a 10” shell I used:
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup oil
3 tablespoons milk

Tomato Festival

food and cooking, my garden,
Persimmon and Early Girl

With all the new varieties Mr. Glad and I are growing this summer, we can have our own Backyard Tomato Tasting Festival.

It’s the best tomato year in at least a decade, partly because we planted more vines, and maybe for some other reasons we are mulling over.

Trays and platters and bowls of tomatoes are crowding the kitchen counters and tables. Time to make soup or just freeze some after I peel and dice them — and take their pictures, of course.

Juliet, SunSugar, Northern Lights

There are some puzzling and disappointing results, like Czech Bush, which was billed by our nursery as being an “orange slicer,” but bears red fruits the size of a large cherry.

Ailsa Craig is in theory interesting, as Tatiana writes on her TOMATObase site, “…a variety of tomato that has been an experimental staple of tomato molecular biology and biotechnology. Originally Ailsa Craig, named for a small rocky island off the coast of England, was grown for greenhouse production of tomatoes in Great Britain. Apparently this crop is particularly important for English breakfasts.”

None of the English or Scottish breakfasts I knew featured tomatoes that small. One seed site predicted 1.5-oz. fruits, another “medium” size, and another 70-90 gm. for Ailsa Craig. I must have read the “medium” word last spring, but now that heirloom tomatoes are so popular, in the future I will do more research, as on Tatiana’s site, and have fewer surprises. And I know now that I want my slicers to be a minimum of 8 oz.

Northern Lights is a pinkish tomato that we expected to be “smallish,” but it was a local news columnist’s “favorite red tomato! Very productive….” The flavor is truly fantastic, but again, they are too small to slice, and too large to pop into the mouth like a cherry tomato — and anyway, we have plenty of cherry tomatoes.

The Brazilian Beauty fruits aren’t large, but the plant is loaded with fruit. I like the unusual flavor, often called “smoky,” and I would like to plant them again, but I’m not sure my husband would go for it. I like having a “black” tomato, and these are nicely shaped and look good arranged on a plate with other varieties.

Brazilian Beauty, Persimmon, and Early Girl

Isn’t that Persimmon gorgeous? It tastes divine, too. I think we will always plant Persimmon tomatoes if we can get them. (In the old days it was Jubilees we adored for orange tomatoes.)

Our one Early Girl plant continues to amaze us – the many fruits are running 8 oz. or more, and are perfect smooth globes with great flavor. The local nursery’s special hybrid is a similarly big, productive and luscious specimen.

Yesterday we made grilled cheese and BLT sandwiches with orange, red and black tomatoes in them. I slice Juliets and Sunsugars in half and throw them into salads, and grab a few as I’m walking past throughout the day.

September is often our biggest tomato month. Even as the nights are getting chillier, and apples are coming on, we are surrounded by these lavish gifts of Summer.