It's that time again....

Well....it's happened. Again.
I was wondering just how long it would be before it would return to grace the shelves of my refrigerator and of course I'm wondering how long it will stay until it fades away once more.
What am I talking about? It's that stuff you either loved as a kid or were totally turned off by it. Give up...? Need another clue...? Ok it wiggles on your plate and it comes in colors. Mine just happens to be orange and it is sugar free! (Oh the joy it brings to someone watching their weight or for those of us who have to watch all of those crazy sugary things lurking on the shelves at the grocery store!)
Ok...I know you guessed it. It's Jell-O! And do I spell it that way? Or is it okay if I spell it Jello, or jello (without that capital letter J)?
I was thinking that it's been YEARS since I've made the stuff and I've had it in my pantry off and on for years! I just never really made the stuff.
Now don't ask me why yesterday I decided to actually take it down from the shelf, tear open the little box and stare at the package thinking..."I wonder if this stuff is any good?" So...I boiled the water (easy) added that to the magical jello concoction and stirred it furiously. I think I liked making the orange "tornado" in the bowl and really don't know how long I had been stirring it when I seemed to snap out of the tornado frenzy with enough time to add the cold water and begin to stir it al over again! Oh what fun! (And some people think that I don't have a life!!) Anyway...now that the cold water had been added to the hot water that I stirred until it was probably just warm water it was time to find the perfect serving bowl that this stuff could get hard in. I grabbed one bowl out of the cabinet and quickly realized that although it was pretty and would make a nice serving bowl, it belonged to the dogs. Something about that made me decide that perhaps another bowl would be better. But...it had to be just the right size. I had thought about pouring the sticky concoction into a 11 x 14 glass lasagna pan but then thought that this was just a small box of jello and it would probably only be about 1/2 inch deep in the pan if I did that. Hmm...I needed something a little bit smaller and maybe a little bit more square! After about 20 minutes of going through one cabinet after another it occurred to me that I hadn't brought in all of my dishes and pots and pans from the garage yet! So....out to the garage I went and stared at the mountain of boxes that Brian had so neatly arranged on one side of the garage (the side away from the hot water heater that he feels is about ready to blow like Mt. St. Helens just because it's probably 8 years old). Ok...I found the box, unpacked it and brought in one of my favorite Corning Ware treasures! A quick wash in the sink, a quicker dry with the towel and soon it was filled with that orange liquid that by now I was just tempted to drink instead of going through all of the trouble of clearing a spot in the refrigerator so that it would "set up."
Well....after "dessert" was made I figured that now I had to get busy and find something to go before it. Brian would be home in a short while and the box said that it needed about 4 hours to set up in the refrigerator. So...back to the freezer this time to stare into it to see what magically wanted to jump into my hands to be offered up as dinner. I tossed out a few things that were getting freezer burn, found 2 freezer pops (for later) a more than 1/2 eaten tub of chocolate "sugar free" looks like ice cream but tastes like paste stuff that is supposed to make diabetic people squirm and giggle with delight! (oh sure....) I discovered that Brian must have had a bad morning because the breakfast cereal (Raisn Bran) was in the freezer with a chip clip across the top of the bag. I'd mention it to him but I bet that the story behind it would be longer then the time it would take me to defrost the bag of cereal and sit down and eat the rest of it. Anyway...I finally agreed that the chicken breasts had to be sacrificed for our dinner and that I would smother it with a can of mushroom soup (to hide the size of the chicken breasts).... Also that new bag of frozen aspargus spears that boasted a new "glaze" sauce to enhance the taste of the asparagus! (Geeze what was I thinking when I bought this stuff?) And of course I had to have some kind of pasta with this so I chose Mac and Cheese (for the 5 year old screaming inside of me for those little pinwheel shapes!) According to the box I could have about 10 little pinwheels before falling prey to a diabetic coma. (It was worth it!)
Brian was a bit surprised when he came home and found dinner cooking. I was tempted to call out another man's name and say something like, "Phillip? Is that you?" But I thought I had better not play with the man after the last few days that he's had.
Dinner was wolfed down quickly and I asked him if he would like dessert. His eyes lit up like the Christmas tree as he quickly said, "Sure!" But I noticed that they dimmed a bit when he saw that it was "just jell-o."
So....I squirted some whipped cream on the top of his jell-o and handed it to him like it had taken all day to prepare and stood back to watch his reaction. He was gracious enough to say..."This is good!" (I'm sure he was talking about the whipped cream on top of the orange stuff!)

And now you know why it will probably be another 15 years before the jello gets made again!