Recipe5

A family favorite, this quick and easy recipe combines canned salmon with diced bell pepper, saltines, onion, a bit of Worcestershire, and hot pepper sauce.

In Part 1 of Adventures in Eating - Unusual Recipes, I told you how I had gotten myself into a cheesy corner. Briefly, I had just published a new website that contained a recipe for Velveeta fudge. The response I got from that recipe was, to put it politely, strong. Now, I had never actually tried this recipe, so I didn't have much of a rebuttal. I finally reached the inescapable conclusion that I would have to make Velveeta fudge, and more importantly, to taste it and report back to my readers. Today, I'll tell you about my adventure in the kitchen making the fudge.

The necessary ingredients were procured, my courage (and, I admit, my curiosity) shored up, and the recipe was brought up on the computer screen (take note of this; it becomes important later). I looked it over, made the decision that I could pretty much remember the whole thing, and marched determinedly into the kitchen.

First step: melt the butter and Velveeta in a large sauce pan. Okay, that's easy enough. Got that started. I haven't used my sifter in fifteen years, but for some unexplainable reason, it sounded like fun. Also, it seemed to me that fudge with big clumps of powdered sugar and cocoa would make for unattractive presentation and suboptimal mouth feel. I dumped the powdered sugar into the sifter and started cranking the little wire thing round and round. It took me right back to childhood. A whole lotta fun. However, that little wire inside the sifter was throwing almost as much sugar out the top as it was sifting down below. Maybe I was having a bit too much fun here. I slowed down a bit with the cranking.

Oh! The cheese was melting quite nicely. But when I stirred, I found crunchy, brown, burnt cheese on my spoon. That had to come out of the mixture. Definitely not a good addition to fudge. Let me tell you, that crunchy cheese stuff was pretty tasty.

Time to sift the cocoa into the sugar. But how much cocoa was I supposed to put in? I ran the twenty-five feet from kitchen to computer to read the screen. I dashed back and sifted the cocoa, keeping a careful eye on the cheese mixture to make sure it didn't burn again.

Now that the cheese was melted and the sugar and cocoa sifted, I was supposed to add the dry ingredients into the pot and stir well. Let me just say that when a recipe calls for a large saucepan, use a large saucepan, not a pretty big medium one. The added ingredients filled the pot, making mixing almost impossible. Oh well, that's why we have dogs and vacuum cleaners (don't worry; I know chocolate is toxic to dogs, and they didn't get any).

Back to the computer I ran to remind myself how much powdered milk, vanilla and nuts to add. I added the powdered milk, but I was pretty skeptical; I was afraid it wouldn't dissolve and that the resulting fudge would have these large white grains of dry milk. I put in extra vanilla, because I come from that school of thought that says if a little bit of something is good, more must be better, which is pretty much true when you're talking about vanilla.

I still had not tasted this concoction and was somewhat hesitant to waste two perfectly good cups of chopped nuts, just in case. I stirred them in, as best as I could, considering how full the pan was getting. When I looked around the kitchen, I couldn't find my 9 x 9 square baking dish, so I just pulled out a round, glass pie dish and sort of heaped the whole, fudgy mixture into it.

I've run out of time again. Check in for Part 3 of Adventures in Eating - Unusual Ingredients, where I'll give you a final report on the fudge and the recipe (really, this time I really mean it).

Barbara O'Brien is an author, cook and mother of two young chefs. To see the offending webpage and to get more Velveeta recipes, visit Velveeta...Exposed. Barbara also encourages adults and children to explore cooking and nutrition together. For more information, visit Kids-Cook.com.