April '10 Home & Family—Susie Isaacs Column

Taste Testing

I
have many friends who will be celebrating March birthdays. In order to celebrate their special days, spring, the sunshine, and life in general, my best friend Hermie, and I decided to give them a party. It started out as a “Pot Roast and Poker” party, but ended up a Birthday Brunch because a few of the guests of honor had previous commitments, later in the day.

I would never try to prepare and serve a new recipe at a gathering without a test run. So a few nights ago, Hermie and I got together to test out some new recipes: Jello Shooters! We thought that rather than the usual daytime drinks of Screwdrivers, Bloody Marys, and Mimosas we wanted to try something different, but not too stout, after all, this is a daytime gathering!

We got recipes off the Internet (you can find anything by surfing the net). We started out with orange, cherry, lime and lemon flavors. We got them all put together, according to the recipes, using regular vodka. What an assembly line we had going! Then we sat back and waited for the “jelling” process to take place. A few hours later, we took our first “bite” of our new drinks. Woowie, zoowie—“knock your socks off” strong! But tasty.

By the time we got around to making our second batch, we had discovered that I had a lot of flavored Vodkas on hand. We also discovered that the lemon wouldn’t jell right. The rest of the flavors did fine. Why, we wondered would lemon not jell? Something to do with the citrus? Then we read the fine print on the lemon box, it was lemon pudding! No wonder it wouldn’t jell!

The second batch was perfect! We altered the Internet recipes and used raspberry-flavored vodka, orange-flavored vodka, and lime-flavored vodka. We cut the amount of the liquor in half, resulting in perfection! After all the taste testing to achieve aforementioned perfection, we made up a little dance called the “Jello Jiggle!”

BTW: Lemon pudding makes a great warm shooter!