I love when you see this massive arrangement of food laid out for you and you think “Alright, it’s feeding time!”
Then you begin to approach it methodically. Not too many carrots, a little turnips, oh, alright, I’ll take two scoops of potatoes. Let’s move onto the parsnips, and hey, is that brocolli? Ok, ok, we’re getting towards the end, WHOA, coleslaw! I don’t need that because right next to it is the STUFFING. MMMM…stuffing. No one will notice if I take two scoops of…ah crap, someone is eyeing up how much stuffing I’m taking. Better just put that extra scoop onto their plate. They’ll think I’m nice. Alright, onto the meat. Oh, here’s some ham and turkey! Bonus! Oh, no one will mind if I take that one with the skin on it. No one likes skin. Mini-pickles! Yum! A few buns here and there also.
Before you know it, the plate that you were trying to lay out nicely has become a disaster area with some potatoes mixing into the turnips and god knows what that monstrosity over on the far edge of the plate is. It’s a cross between brocolli, some sort of baked good and resembles The Blob. Then you top it all with gravy because you can’t really find the meat anymore and it just holds it together a little better.
Instead of a nice turkey dinner, you now have Easter Ghoulash on a plate. Top that off with everyone shovelling it in in 3 minutes or less and you have the typical North American turkey dinner. I say North American because I have eaten with some European families and they like these things to spread out over three days. In those cases I feel dumb for shovelling down the plate so I have to get another one just to feel like part of the crowd. Europeans are strange that way. 😉
I hope everyone had a similar experience when it came to Easter dinner. I know Mel and Mike were having an army over at their place so I can only assume that they also encountered this phenomenon.
I wonder if it would just be easier to actually MAKE a ghoulash for dinner.