2- 4oz. jars baby food?!

Welcome to Semi-Edible! Today, we are very hesitant to continue on with this project, due to the disgustingly disgusting crab fest from last cocktail time. So, we attempted to pick seemingly decent russipes from Aunt Sandy’s decorative and festive recipe box.

First up was the Spinach Salad with Mangos, Dried Cranberries and Chocolate Vinegar-ette.It seemed harmless enough: a bag of baby spinach, diced mangos, cranberries and chopped walnuts are tossed in a dressed up Newman’s Own balsamic vinegar-ette(this entails mixing the already delicious dressing with 1Tbs. cocoa powder and 1tsp. sugar). With these creative touches, no one is going to know that you didn't make this from scratch. Sound simple and possibly delicious right? Wrong. With this russipe, people are going to think you suck at cooking (and possibly life). First off, the proportions are completely off. We halved the russipe so we wouldn’t waste anything and can I just tell you? ¼ cup vinegar-ette for 4 cups spinach is way way way too much vinegar-ette. And you can’t take it out, because the directions say to mix the dressing in the bottom of the bowl in which you then add all the salad ingredients. It was awful because the dressing just sat there in a disgusting shallow pool and sogg-ified the mangos, walnuts and cranberries. Not only was there too much dressing, but the addition of cocoa powder is not good. I used really good dutch cocoa powder and it made the dressing taste choc-y chalky. To fix this, I recommend using the same ingredients and ditching the vinegar-ette. Fail.

Next we tried baby food! Well, not just baby food, but a whole slue of ingredients mixed into apple cinnamon muffin mix to make the semi-edible Carrot Coconut Muffins with Honey Butter. A pre-made box mix is combined with 2(maybe 4) jars pureed carrot baby food, 1/4c. apple juice, 1tsp. cinnamon, 1/2tsp. ginger and 1c. toasted coconut. This makes 12 muffins and looked like vomit when mixed (mmmmm, delishhhous). There is some contention on this recipe's review board as to the amount of baby food required. On the show she added 2 jars, but the recipe says 4. Numerous people who used 4 complained that the muffins never cooked all the way through....so we used 2 jars. The muffins were super gummy and stuck to our teeth. Liz, being the texture freak that she is, only took 2 bites. The flavor wasn't anything special either. All we could taste was cinnamon, carrot and sometimes a hint of coconut. The apple from the original muffin mix was completely lost, although perhaps that is the point since Sandy's russipe title has no mention of apple. This was served for her Garden Brunch episode; I woudn't even serve these to babies let alone brunchers. In all honesty I would gladly eat straight up baby food before making these again.

For Cocktail time we made the Big Sur Cocktail: a highball glass filed with 1 part amaretto, 1/2 part blue Curacao (is there really any other color?) and 1 part white cran juice. Harmless enough right? While it wasn't bad, it wasn't good either. And I definitely don't want a highball glass full of this ridiculously sweet concoction. It was too sweet and would work as a shot, but not a drink. Don't make this unless you like super sweet drinks. Also, please note the color difference between our drink and Aunt Sandy's. I don't know where Sandy buys her Amaretto, but mine is tinted brown, which means her drink is a fraud! Although to be honest, mine looks more like Big Sur than hers- hah.

So this cocktail time was fairly unmemorable, but at least it helped to talk us off the ledge (seriously, that crab crap was the worst experience ever. I may never eat crab again. Thanks a lot Aunt Sandy). Well, we are all out of time today so remember to keep it sweet, keep it over dressed, keep it fraudulent and always keep is Semi-Edible.