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Food Crime: Frosty the Slawman

so a while ago, I saw this photo going around on tumblr:

at first, I thought this was photoshopped. I mean, "welcome new man in your life"? that feels like a translation error, or someone being silly on purpose.

but guess what! turns out, Frosty Slaw Man is real!

and soon...he will be mine. let's get cooking

(full disclosure: I crafted this snowman and took notes about it over a year ago. and then, like with many things in my life, I forgot about him, and let him drift into the ADHD void of Things I'm Not Currently Staring At, where object permanence is tentative and largely unrealized.

but here we are! and here he is: the slaw man. it's time to share him with you, so that you can suffer as I have suffered, and/or rejoice in my gelatin creation!)

so this recipe photo originally came from Mid-Century Menu (archive link), a blog that seems like one after my own heart, and which once tried to make the Slaw Man (with not much success; but we'll get back to that)! but it's not just that blog that has copies of this ad. I also found it on reddit, and in a few different places on ebay!

lookit that guy! he's a real guy!

both the reddit post and some of the ebay listings say that this is from 1963 (though I haven't been able to figure out which magazines it was printed in, to confirm this for myself). but in looking this up, I discovered something else fun! there's another version of this ad!

Best Foods is what Hellmann's stuff is called on the west coast, and the "this is no place for second best" thing makes a lot more sense when you consider that the ad was probably made for Best Foods first, and then just reused and rebranded for the east coast

the more you know!

anyway the benefit of finding this alternate ad is that the scan on this image is a lot clearer, and so the recipe is more readable! and in looking at it, I've realized something important:

when Mid-Century Menu tried this recipe, they got an ingredient amount wrong.

when they made their beloved Slaw Man, they had the water amount written down as 1/4 cup, but looking at this scan up close, it is actually 3/4 cup of water! something that might make a significant difference, considering we're working with gelatin!

(there's also another change I want to make compared to what they did, when I do this recipe. but we'll get into that in a sec.)

for now: we begin

so. there's no way I'm making a Slaw Man this large. I am just one person, and considering the ingredients of this, I don't think I'm going to be able to consume that much Slaw.

two entire heads of cabbage? three pounds of cottage cheese, a thing that I don't even like to eat? no. that's a bad idea.

so I'm starting small here and making this 1/3 the size of the original:

2 packets of unflavored gelatin 1/4 cup cold water 1 cup mayo 1 tsp salt 1lb cottage cheese 4 cups shredded cabbage

surely this will result in a reasonable amount of Man

...okay, I started chopping the cabbage thinking it would be easier, but I've given up and pulled out a grater. this is much better! and somehow more violent (affectionate)

the recipe says to soften the gelatin in cold water, and then stir over hot water until it's dissolved. I'm going to assume "stir over hot water" means a double boiler, so let's do that

hmmm, the gelatin is very foamy? it’s melted, but the bottom of the pot feels really....sticky

okay. after a couple minutes more and no change, I’m calling this good enough.

so one thing that others who have attempted this recipe have not taken into consideration is the cottage cheese. you see, the others used normal cottage cheese, but the recipe says to use "cottage cheese, cream style"

I’ll be real, I’m not 100% what that means, since we don’t have that here. but I can take an educated guess! so let’s blend the cottage cheese!

(with an immersion blender. I am not willing to wash an actual blender because of this)

mmm, yes. very smooth

...actually. why isn't all cottage cheese like this? the thing I hate about cottage cheese is the texture, so why isn't it all smooth and creamy like this?? I could eat this!!

a new discovery is made every day in this house.

okay, time to start mixing things together.

ah, frosty. I opened a whole new thing of mayo for you! do you feel special?

(I'd make a "pre-dinner snack?" joke, but sometimes I think I'm the only one that remembers Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time)

okay, the mayo, cottage cheese, and salt have been added to the gelatin. but as this cools, the texture is getting...hmm. less than appealing.

lastly: the cabbage

oh. oh this is not very nice

next it says to pack the "salad" into a one pound container, and two six-cup bowls, but since I made this recipe so much smaller, I'm going to uhhhh. uh. find some bowls that seem like they'd be correct...snowman? proportions?

ah. this bowl is too big.

hey, these'll work!

now I just have to let them chill for a while, and continue another day.

(edit from current!me: ahhh oh my god I forgot this was pretty soon after we adopted Jackie! look at these cat pics that I took while I was food crime-ing!

look at them having their little interactions! Knuckles was trying so hard to be friends with her! I love them)

hello! two days later and we are ready to assemble the slawman. and my sibling has started referring to him as "frosty: attorney at slaw", so that's fun.

I've done a thing where, as these set, I flipped them around in the bowl so that hopefully they'd be more round. we'll see if they actually stay like this.

I have also made some decorations for him out of peppers, olives, and carrots!

let's build our boy

oh he's so heavy. and wobbly

no no no he almost fell over!!

okay. he's fine. but more skewers were needed.

and...okay. he is complete.

behold!

gaze upon my beautiful man!

(he is not structurally sound! he wobbles unsteadily as I rotate him! there are already cracks forming in the gelatin around where his arms are! don't worry about it!)

 now it's time to stab him

and...to devour him

this tastes like...a bland coleslaw? and not even that. it's just sort of a salty, cottage cheese-y cabbage. the ingredients don't combine to become something greater, they simply...sit there. like this.

and the texture is...mmm. it's not a jello kind of texture, but it is a bit squashy in a way that's mildly strange.

it's very creamy once it softens in your mouth.

...I don't like this!

and look! taking just that one chunk from him was enough to destabilize him entirely :(

RIP frosty. now I just have to see if I can eat all of you before you go bad.

(note from current!me: I could not.

 I ate maybe half of him over the course of many days, often adding other stuff to him to try to add some flavor: bacon, frozen peas, cheese, etc. but even with that, I just couldn't stomach him.

after a while I stuck what was left of him in the freezer, hoping that maybe I'd find the will to consume the rest of him some other day.

do you know what a frozen-and-then-thawed mixture of cabbage, cottage cheese, mayo, and gelatin looks and tastes like?

bad. the answer is: bad.

I threw him out pretty quickly after thawing him.

do not try this recipe at home)

Scoliosis gang rise up..!

THE ULTIMATE PAINTER

ai art is like being a runner and youre excited for a marathon and youre training and then someone comes up and says 'why not use this new 'car tech' it can drive you to the finish line and youll have run the marathon without that pesky running'. then theyre confused when you say no and run instead

its just this really strange fundamental misunderstanding of art and expression. the bizarre idea (usually from those without the capacity to find their own inner artist) thinking THE ULTIMATE PAINTER would no longer have to paint but instead have a room full of finished works

conclave is a very good film made up of cardinal thomas lawrence having three horrible horrible days.

however the one thing it lacks is the consideration of how much worse they could have been if it lasted longer.

day four of conclave and the draw between tedesco and lawrence does not budge.

five days of conclave and at least one of the cardinals whose name got covered up in the trembley report backs lawrence against the wall and tries to threaten him with a kitchen knife before falling to weeping on his shoulder. day six of conclave and cardinal adeyemi and cardinal trembley nearly come to blows in the loggia. day seven of conclave and people start sneaking wine bottles into the sistine chapel.

day eight and they're passing them around covertly during the interminable voting process. day nine and three separate white collar crimes come to light because the guilty parties are sweating in their cassocks thinking lawrence has the dirt on them and they can't take the pressure anymore, they just can't.

day ten and vincent benítez is doing quiet prayer catechism hour in the garden after lunch.

day eleven and sabbadin is snorting someone's vicodin in the bathroom.

day twelve and the cardinals for warsaw and budapest are having a terrible breakup everyone is trying to pretend not to notice. day thirteen and lawrence stays in his room the whole day pretending he has a stomach ache and keeps having his nap dreams interrupted by dreams of turtles.

day fourteen and aldo bellini has brought his copy of giovanni's room to reread, half-heatedly hidden behind a bible cover.

day fifteen and vincent benítez has lead by example a number of cardinals into helping out in the kitchen at least once a week to frankly terrible culinary results and growing camaraderie.

sixteen days of conclave and lawrence has to sit down ray o'malley and actively beg him not to tell him anything else, please, no more info, no more digging into old scandals, no nothing.tedesco's tax audits may be suspiciously clean but lawrence is a man of god not a forensic attorney and he will not dig deeper.

day seventeen and lawence tracks o'malley down and asks him to look into tedesco's brother's recent real estate acquisitions.

day eighteen and the new whisper campaign to discredit lawrence keeps trying to bring up his most controversial progressive views but he keeps answering impatiently back with well-thought of biblical references as he did in the homily and accidentally causes a reprise of his canon law school lecture debates. which temporarily brings everyone together and opens the stage for a fierce ideological debate.

wherein lawrence gets accused, not entirely inaccurately, by trembley and adeyemi, united once more in offense, of being the last figurehead for the complacent liberal establishment/a judgemental prig and/or treating the college of cardinals like a group of jumped-up seminarians.

aldo bellini implies very loudly that tedesco is ugly, a fascist and too stupid to ever be invited to lecture at the sourbonne even once, and cardinal vincent benítez speaks up with great dignity and strength against american imperialism.

day nineteen and someone actively tries to murder the patriarch of venice. day twenty and it is revealed via sister agnes ex machina and cardinal benítez's disconcerting familiarity with very real and more successful murder attempts that tedesco was trying to frame bellini for it.

the proof is circumstantial and so are any accusations lawrence or anyone could make against him of corruption, but this does prompt him to go on a long speech about how the leftist agenda has thoroughly ruined not only the church but society at least and made any possible unity among men a sham.

day twenty-one and someone actually dies, unrelated to the tedesco fake-plot.

day twenty-two and they elect vincent benítez. lawrence hides in the room of tears having an anxiety attack of relief.

vincent benítez holds his hand tenderly through it and immediately accepts his resignation as dean but not before telling him his secret and having his hands held back tightly, and being told very earnestly that, short of actual unreasonable harm to other people and an extraordinary amount of bribery, he could be made by god's will in any possible variation and still have lawrence's trust. and most importantly, lawrence's papacy.

day one of innocentius xiv's papacy and lawrence finds him in the gardens feeding the turtles instead of taking the next train to a nice monastery in liège and offers himself as secretary of state. and this is why netflix should hire me.

"I am not, nor have I ever been, “adorable.” Especially now Martin."

Just a fellow eldritch horror being grumpy. His boyfriend slightly amused.

(I am obsessed with this fake-cinematic-format, I need to make thousand more.)

(more monster!jon here)

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