Ah, yes, meat in aspic. I’m pretty sure I’ve had that before in my eastern travels, had pretty much everything else. Even in this country, I will concede, Jell-O has its points, but I just say to myself
“this isn’t really food!”. Growing up, I did love their egg custard with nutmeg — came in a little brown box, and you mixed it up and put it in the refrigerator to jell — but, as with so many things I develop a taste for, they took it off the market. There is a canned chili starter mix, Simple Suppers or something like that, but just as soon as it became my “go-to” base for chili,
>whoosh!< off the market, can’t get it anymore. You do have to add an extra can of kidney beans, what comes in the Simple Suppers can isn’t nearly enough. (And yes, I know, there are many, many different schools of thought on what constitutes “proper” chili. Some people reject beans as anathema, some even reject tomatoes, I’ve even heard of a certain Texan chili that consists solely of the meat, the spices, and whatever gravy results from cooking all of that together. And then there’s Cincinnati chili, which is counter-intuitive to pretty much anyone who has ever become accustomed to any other kind of chili.)
Cincinnati chili - Wikipedia
I’ve eaten it plain in the bowl before, with oyster crackers and nothing else. I don’t see what’s so strange about that. Cincinnati, like Pittsburgh or Baltimore, is one of those old, heavily ethnic American cities that is
sui generis. You’d never mistake it for anyplace else.
I like rice pudding, it’s nothing I would go out and buy in those little Kozy Shack cups, but if it were served to me, I wouldn’t mind. The weird thing is this dessert called
kisiel (kish-ul), it’s a Polish thing, like Jell-O made with potato starch. It’s all right, but I wouldn’t make it a point to get that either.
Zurek (zhoo-rek), on the other hand, kind of a creamy rye soup, slice up a hard-boiled egg and put it in the
zurek, now
there’s some good eating!
(If this is deemed “off-topic”, and I am dinged for it, well, then, this will have been my
final post. Grease for peace!)