Kitchen Experiments

---We interrupt this series for a special 

Frugal News Bulletin 

from the 'Sponsors' who enable us to bring you the 

What Bill & Shelley Did This Summer 

series.---

Bill can always tell when I'm feeling anxious about money: I quit buying food. This generally happens around the time of doing my taxes or after we return from a long holiday. As it happened both events coincided this month and I think he started to worry. It's not that we could possibly go hungry, there is far too much food in this house for that to happen; just we might not have the exact same things he's used to. 

For example, he's never had a mango/grapefruit/strawberry yogurt gelatin for dessert. Neither have I, but looking at what was waiting in the pantry/freezers waiting to be used up, this is what I selected. 

I looked on the gelatin manufacturer's website, as the package gave little instruction. The first recipe I came to said to use 100 ml boiling water with a sachet of gelatin and it called for roughly 50g of sugar and 550g of other ingredients. So that's the recipe I used, pouring in two thawed pots of yogurt, pulling any membrane off the grapefruit before tossing it in and making up the 550g with part of a large tin of mango pulp. Don't ask me why I bought mango pulp. It's not particularly sweet...it was cheap...I was feeling adventurous?

It was a big success. The only thing I'd do differently is to puree the grapefruit to distribute it more evenly. 'Floating fruit' was what I was thinking, but perhaps that's only effective in clear Jello. I also have it in mind to increase the ingredients per sachet. This set solid in only five hours and I'm thinking I could have stretched the sachet to more than five servings.

There is plenty of frozen fruit and a lot more of that tin of mango waiting to be experimented with, though it may not in the freezer in the mean time. If I get tired of gelatin I can always fall back on spice cake.






Have you had any kitchen experiments lately?