Jade Cheese Salad

It sounds like something you might buy off a street vendor in Hong Kong. "Foh you, spesol plice. You so pletty I tink of dis when I see you!" Of course, I've never gotten anything in Hong Kong that didn't taste good.

1 large pkg. lime Jell-O
2 cups hot water
1 cup cold water
2 t. vinegar
2 t. salt
dash cayenne pepper
2 cups cottage cheese
1 cup mayonnaise
1 large can crushed pineapple

Dissolve Jell-O in hot water. Stir in cold water, vinegar, salt and cayenne pepper. Chill until slightly thickened and then whip with a beater until light and fluffy. Stir in cottage cheese and mayonnaise until thoroughly mixed. Drain pineapple and fold into mixture. Chill until firm.

Now first of all let me say that I am not at all opposed to Jell-O salads in general. I've had some very nice ones. This is not one of them, nor will it ever be.

It starts out okay until you get to the vinegar. It just goes downhill from there. What possible purpose could there be for vinegar in a Jell-O salad? I have racked my brain and I can't seem to come up with any. And right on the heels (I first typed in 'hells' by mistake, though it might be more accurate) of that you add 2 whole TEASPOONS of salt?! Apparently this is not one of those sweet Jell-O salads, but more of a savory one. Maybe you should add more than a dash of cayenne to numb your tongue so you don't have to taste the rest of it. Then we come to cottage cheese. Not my favorite cheese, but okay, I can handle it. Is 2 cups really necessary, though? And then of course, let us not forget the ubiquitous 1 cup of mayonnaise. Why is it that so many nasty recipes are drowned in mayonnaise? We need to institute some sort of federal regulation that limits the amount of mayonnaise you can use in a recipe, with life imprisonment the punishment for going over. And did anybody notice that we're adding just as much cottage cheese and mayonnaise combined as we did water to the Jell-O. There's just something wrong with the proportions here. Finally we finish it off with a lot of crushed pineapple, which I'm sure just brings everything else together into one cohesive and balanced whole. Yeah, that's it. And to achieve this monstrosity we can't just dump everything in, mix it together and let it chill. No, we need to put more effort into it. We have to whip it until it's light and fluffy. Makes me want to whip whoever came up with this recipe.