**BONUS POST! Two posts in one day, what, am I crazy?**
Ok, this post is a little late for Halloween I realize, but I had to warn you guys, just in case any of my fellow Pinterest fiends had found the same recipe and had considered making Thanksgiving or Christmas worms.
Don’t do it.
And not just because the idea of Thanksgiving or Christmas worms is weird. I’m down with weird. Don’t do it because this is the project from hell.
I went to a Halloween party this past weekend, and I had said I would bring something. …I didn’t write down that I was planning on bringing something, so of course I forgot until my friend mentioned it the night before. Whoops.
I’d seen this pin on Pinterest and I thought it was a fun idea. “Jello worms,” I thought to myself, “I can do that!”
Ha.
The directions specifically state that you’ll need a “tall, slim container” for this project. I was sure I’d have something. The Mr. being an exuberant cook like he is, we have essentially every kitchen tool ever made. I was wrong.
Our especially tall and slim juice pitchers were too wide. Our drinking glasses were too short. I finally settled on the pitcher that came with our immersion blender. With sloped sides, it wasn’t an ideal choice, but it was the only thing that was remotely close to working.
I wrote off my difficulty finding a container as the project’s token frustration and powered forward. Boy was I overly optimistic.
I boiled my water and got my jello setting up.
I used blackberry FUSION (caps totally necessary) for my flavor
While I waited for the jello to cool, I pulled the straws out of the box…unscrunched the bendy part of every single one and stuffed them as tightly as I could into the blender pitcher. …turns out, when it’s 100 of them, unscrunching straws is really time consuming and annoying. Also, because the pitcher had sloped sides (definitely not ideal) I had to rubberband them all together at the top so they would stand upright and not flop all over the place.
Once the mix cooled, I added the cream and the food dye and poured it into the straws/pitcher.
It took12 drops of green dye to get that, uhm, lovely color
I let everything set over night and pulled it out the next afternoon.
…I had gotten it in my head that because I had quite a bit of straw length above the top of the pitcher, I’d be able to more or less wiggle the whole thing out in one clump and break it apart once everything had gelled. It didn’t work out that way.
I got my first indication that this was going to be a nightmare project when I had to pull most of the straws out one at a time.
The next step was to get the worms OUT of the straws. Couldn’t be that hard, right? After everything I’d already done, if this part was hard, who would reasonably think this was all worth it?
One worm done:
Ok…that wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t easy, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it…
…or not.
For this to work, you have to be able to keep your water temperature at the exact right level. Even if you do, by about 20 in, your fingers hurt like crazy from squeezing, but too hot and your worms melt (like above), too cold and they won’t come out of the straw.
…I live in a nearly 100 year old house. We don’t so much do precision around here. About half of my worms melted.
This is what I had by the time I gave up:
Pretty cool/gross looking I’ll admit, and fairly tasty, but SO not worth the work.
To recap: Really hard to find a container that works properly for chilling. Really difficult to get chilled straws OUT of said container. Damn near impossible to get worms out of straws.
You go ahead and make your Thanksgiving and Christmas worms if you want to, but don’t say I didn’t warn you!!
Especially Creative Broad 