Silly Salad Saturday!

I love me some weird-ass salad recipes, so today, let's check out what All of Our Favorites Cook Book (The Pioneer Partners of Hawkeye Chapter #17, undated) has to offer.

Of course, we need to do unspeakable things with Jell-O, so Super Meat Salad should fill that role.

This has the distinction of being the only gelatin salad recipe I've seen to incorporate a can of undiluted chicken noodle soup! (Usually it's tomato soup if they're going for the canned-soup-and-Jell-O vibe.) I'm not sure what makes this a "super meat" salad if it has only the usually-skimpy portion of chicken from a can of chicken-noodle soup, plus (maybe) a can of shrimp as the meat, but it seems nitpicky to question its meatiness when its claim to being super is at least equally questionable.

Of course, if things just won't feel the same without canned tomato soup and gelatin, there's always Tomato Soup Salad.

I know it doesn't look like there's Jell-O if you just read the ingredients, but the two packages of lemon Jell-O are listed in the narrative instructions, but not the ingredient list. That's sure to be a nice surprise when you're halfway through the recipe and realize you didn't get all the ingredients! It's also a good sign to have a recipe with instructions on what to do if the tomato-soup-cream-cheese-lemon-Jell-O mixture looks "curdled"! For that extra special touch, make sure this concoction goes into a fish mold. (This doesn't explicitly tell you that it needs olive eyes when it comes out, but you know they're required for any fish mold.)

It's not all Jell-O molds, of course. If you need a dessert salad but are sick of Jell-O since you used it in the savory salads, there's always this:

Yep! Spaghetti Salad dyes the spaghetti pink so you'll know it's dessert-y, and then loads it up with apples, pineapple, an egg, lemon juice, and powdered sugar dressing, and fluffy Cool Whip. It better be "very good" because it "Makes a big batch."

If you'd rather have a sweet salad you can keep on hand for months, though, then Fruit Salad Ice might be the way to go.

I can't really imagine keeping a freezer full of foil cupcake wrappers filled with mixed fruit in a sugar syrup to unpeel and plop down on a lettuce leaf whenever the mood strikes, but Keith "Pete" Peters heartily endorses it, and hey, when we're all still supposed to stay away from too many unnecessary trips into the outside world, it might still be reasonable advice.... It certainly seems like the most sensible idea in this whole group!

Here's hoping we can get actual fresh fruit whenever we want soon....