Retraction: Holiday Recipe

Last week I checked out Claire’s blog, and she had me beat. Recipes! Damn her! Chicken And Dumplings! Lasagna! In a desperate ploy to catch up, I posted my own recipe. Unfortunately, there were a few errors.

Let me apologize. My recipe for Zesty Holiday Jello did say “…add 1 cup of Polar King brand antifreeze.” True, automobile antifreeze does have a “festive green color”. But antifreeze contains the potent neurotoxin Ethylene Glycol. Thankfully, blog readers caught the mistake and emailed me.

Readers also pointed out that Ethylene Glycol has a chemical structure similar to Ethyl Polystyrene, the flammable ingredient in napalm. My “stove-top” directions for boiling the jello did not take that into account. Again, my apologies. If your Thanksgiving or Christmas gathering was marred by a kitchen fire, I feel terrible about that.

Worse still, I included directions for heating the jello for an hour in a high temperature pressure cooker. The resulting detonations were spectacular, and caused structural damage to many a reader’s kitchen. Phrases like “the Very Fires of Hell whipsawed through our home” and “helplessly watched as a 24 pound frozen turkey became a deadly missile” were emailed to me. Again, sorry. Judging from the letters that poured into my mailbag, people were amazed at the velocity reached by objects that had rested near the boiling jello. Christmas trees that flew outside and speared through parked cars. Cans of cranberry sauce that vanished off kitchen counters and were found miles away, embedded in the roof of a nursing home or church steeple.

Though the explosions and apocalyptic walls of flame were tragic, it was after this point that things took a decided turn for the worse. Distracted by kitchen fires and hurtling kitchenware, people left their beloved pets unattended. Let me point out that when I worked for Minnesota Poison Control in the 1990’s, I only took calls about *human* poisoning. True, I did know that antifreeze can cause blindness and liver failure in humans. I can’t be expected to know the range of neurotoxicologic problems that antifreeze will cause in a dog or cat. “Homicidal psychosis” being the chief complaint. This is just a temporary side effect, and most animals recover fully. That is of little solace to the poor readers who battled kitchen fires, unaware that their pets were lapping up spilled antifreeze, and who then bundled their pets and family into a car or minivan to escape the inferno. Locked in a crowded minivan, driving toward the fire station at 100 m.p.h., is perhaps the worst time to have a beloved cat or dog spring into a homicidal frenzy. Apologies.