All the Jell-O in My Life

In which we discover the point at which there ceases to be room for Jell-O

There is something intrinsically hilarious about Jell-O. I don't know if it's because it used to come in such disturbing flavors as Celery and Tomato, or because housewives dutifully ensconced everything from salad to tuna in the aforementioned and called it dinner.

And while I, personally, have never enjoyed actually eating it, I do get a great deal of amusement out of making it, or at least, attempting to make it. Lacking an amusingly flavored gelitan this time around, I instead decided to go for sheer volume. That's right. I was going to combine one box each of every flavor of Jell-O I could find, and thus create Super Jell-O.

First thing's first:procuring the Jell-O. I went to every grocery store in a 400-mile radius (which actually only totalled 6 stores. Hey, I live on the fucking prairie.) and came up with 18 separate flavors of Jell-O. It's important to note here that I only bought actual Jell-O brand gelitan, because if I got into store brands it would never end. Also, I wanted this to be a quality gelitan monstrosity, thankyouverymuch.

Here's the full list of flavors I ended up with:

Apricot	Berry Blue
Black Cherry	Cherry
Cranberry	Cran-Raspberry
Grape	Island Pineapple
Lemon	Lime
Mixed Fruit	Orange
Peach	Strawberry Banana
Strawberry Kiwi	Wild Strawberry
Xtreme Sour Apple	Xtreme Watermelon

I have always wondered about this...Who can really tell the difference between Apricot and Peach? Do we need both these flavors? I know they've both been around for at least the last 20 years, meanwhile fifty other flavors have come and gone. Honestly. Perhaps we could just settle for one of those, and invest some of that flavor-specificity in extricating an actual fruit or two from the mess that is Berry Blue. I really hate Berry Blue. There are no blue berries. Even actual blueberries are purple. The fuckers.

As far as the actual construction of the super Jell-O goes, I decided to just multiply the basic instructions by 18 and go from there. This was the first indication I had that this would be maybe more to deal with than I'd had in mind. 18 packages of Jell-O yielded more than a liter of powder, and one hell of a sand scupture.


And to this I was to add 4 LITERS of water. Rather more than I had been expecting, and certainly more than would fit in any of my standard issue kitchen containers. Clearly, this called for something special. Something big. This called for... the crisper drawer. Figuring if I ended up with more than that there was no possible way I'd get it in the fridge, I just went ahead and poured the whole mess into one of the refrigerator drawers.

Fortunately for both me and the fridge, that turned out to be just perfect. Full of the satisfaction that only comes with a completely pointless job well done, I left it to set up overnight. Surprisingly, it did actually set, more or less. Well...mostly less. It never did achieve the solidity of normal Jell-O, instead preferring to hover somewhere between lumpy juice and runny salad. (Sorry, running out of metaphors here.)

The unexpected problem arising from this the next day was that it was nearly impossible to dispose of. It was too solid to pour down the drain, but not solid enough to lift out of the drawer and throw away. I spent a good half hour trying to scoop it up and throw it in the trash before I gave up in disgust. By this time, the kitchen counter looked as if I had been disassembling a mob hit, and the Jell-O was starting to melt into nastily viscous little piles of sticky shit that I knew would never, ever entirely wash off.

And that is to say nothing of the smell. It was disgustingly sweet, and permeated every inch of the fridge, including much of the food therein. The bread sitting on the shelf above the Jell-O tasted like the aftermath of a Care Bear circle jerk. It took a week before I could eat something out of the fridge without sniffing it in fear first.

And what did I learn from the experience? Not a goddamn thing. I did discover that every flavor of Jell-O together tastes pretty much like any one flavor of Jell-O by itself, but I don't know how useful that information will be to me in later life, so eh. It was however, an amusing experience, and a good waste of an evening, which really is all I ever ask for in life.