Beans, Mushrooms and Despair

When it comes to scary jellied salads, no one does it better than the Weight Watchers Recipe Cards from 1974. This retro recipe card collection contains a treasure trove of delightfully awful salads...Most of which are encased in gelatin for no apparent reason.

For this week's adventure, I selected the "Bean and Mushroom Salad". Here's the recipe in case you ever take leave of your senses, and would want to make this for yourself one day.

Yeah. It's really that gross. But that recipe card only tells part of the horror story.

First of all - when you go to the supermarket to get your ingredients, its like a really weird scavenger hunt as you try to find everything. Pimentos! Knox Unflavored Gelatin! Onion flakes! Canned mushrooms! Who in their right mind buys these things anymore?

Next - as you prepare this salad, it becomes apparent that you are entering some type of twilight zone for vegetables. Let's review: Go ahead and take a bunch of perfectly good vegetables and suspend them in a clear jellied form, oh and make sure you have combined them with a buttload of artificial sweetener and vinegar first. Then wait about 5 hours before you can even eat it.

It glistens...

It trembles...

It twitches...

Let me assure you, it tastes as bad as it looks.

Plus there is the added bonus that it sticks to your plate even when you turn it sideways and try to throw it in the garbage. It's like the salad that WILL NOT DIE.

You cannot get rid of this thing,
no matter how hard you try.

When I finally disposed of this salad catastrophe, the smell of vinegar still lingered in the air for hours. Just to remind me of what I had just done.

VERDICT: There is really no need for this salad to exist. Folks, take my advice...the next time you have a taste for green beans and mushrooms - crack open the cans, pour them in a bowl, heat them up and eat 'em!