My sister was hospitalized for many extended periods of time when she was what is known now as a tween. The best part of it is that there was a Robot at the hospital that would carry medications to the different floors. The nurses at the stations would take the right medicines out of it when it got to their floor. The Robot would ride up and down the elevator all day. My uncle wondered what would happen if he jumped in front of it. The Robot just asked him to move. She was there long enough for us all to have a turn at harrassing the robot. Unfortunately, it didn’t understand if you asked it to bring you a rootbeer or an ice cream sundae. It only dealt in meds and only said about four things.
Oh, yes, the worst part about it was that she was in the hospital. It was really tough being there the one year because she missed Halloween and had Thanksgiving at the hospital too. That bites.
When she was feeling better and was released, she came home with a big trauma. She had post traumatic stress about jello. Whenever she saw it, she wouldn’t merely say that she had to much of it at the hospital every single day. She would sometimes cry, or often scream “Get it out of here! I hate Jello!” It was similar to someone with a deathly fear of spiders.
There was a strange phenomena, though. While she had an aversion to the jiggly wiggly stuff, she was okay with Pretzel Jello, a staple of family gatherings. I am not quite sure why.
Here is the recipe:
Ingredients
2 Cups of broken or coarsely chopped pretzels (That is for normal people. My family uses whole mini pretzels)
1 1/2 sticks butter
2 (8 oz.) pkgs. cream cheese
2 cups of. sugar
2 (3 oz.) packages of Jello. Normally anything red, but be creative!
2 cups of pineapple juice
2 small boxes of frozen strawberriesPut the pretzels and the melted butter in a pan, bake 10 minutes at 400 degrees. It usually looks better with broken pretzels, but our family is “special.” In that case the butter just sort of coats them versus it looking like some sort of mixed up spread. Then, you mix up the cream cheese with the sugar IN A DIFFERENT CONTAINER and then you spread this over the pretzel/butter combo. But oh, yeah, you have to take it out of the oven first. The pan with the pretzels and butter i mean.
Then, you take the pineapple juice and boil it and then dump the jello in there. Don’t already make the Jello, you just want whatever powder that is in the package to go in. Then, you take the frozen strawberries and out it in there with the juice and jello. Once that is all mixed up, you go back to the pan and put that stuff on top of the cream cheese layer.
Now things get really dicey. You are supposed to put Whipped Topping on top of it next. My family, as I say, is a little different, so you just go ahead and ad ANOTHER layer of whole pretzels to the top of it. After you went through all the steps, stick it in the fridge. The Jello that has been violated by the strawberries and pineapple juice needs to set up.
I think I discovered why my sister can eat this. It may contain Jello but it doesn’t look like Jello. I didn’t know why I didn’t think about pouring Jello powder into a cup and saying it was Kool-Aid mix to see if she would figure it out when we were kids. Oh, that probably would have been mean, just like someone baking bugs from the yard in Brownies and asking you to try it, but not telling you there were bugs in it.
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