As we move into the Christmas season, the biggest challenge I run into is managing expectations. I want those perfect moments. The Christmas card should have all 3 children looking in the same direction. The plates of cookies and candy should rival those in the pages of magazines. The tree needs to be the perfect mix of nostalgia and our personalities. It’s hard to get everything just right.
The kids have their own expectations. There needs to be enough time for all the snowman building, sledding, and cookie making. They submit their list of presents (via Google Docs this year?!?). There are movies that need watching. We got Die Hard over with early so we can concentrate on White Christmas and Christmas in Connecticut and other great classics, like the Mistletones.
At some point I stand back and look at my imperfect family and wonder what I was thinking. The kitchen is not going to be really clean again until Boxing Day. The kids are not going to get everything they want. The tree is going to be lopsided and the needles will fall off because no one will remember to water it no matter how many times I ask.
That doesn’t even start with the hormones and overtiredness. We all end up with whatever virus is going on and everyone is in a hurry to finish up everything before the end of the year. At the point I really look at my family, I remember that expectations can make or break experiences. It is inevitable that when our expectations are overly high, we come away disappointed. When our expectations are too low we devalue ourselves. The reality of us being ourselves makes our Christmas perfect.
Learning to manage my expectations helps when making some of these recipes, like the ones I made at Thanksgiving.
Just before Thanksgiving, I had a conversation with my brother about my blog and Thanksgiving dinner.
“I’ve got all of these great-grandma recipes to make which means they all have to be photographed.” I said to him.
“You know what the problem is,” he said to me. “All of the recipes you have been making are good. I never get to try the really terrible ones.”
“Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be here for things like the Iowa Egg Foo Yung.”
He insisted that he would.
I took him at his word and promised something like tuna egg foo yung. However when it came time to deliver, I couldn’t pull the trigger and ruin my perfect dinner with something that would perhaps smell as bad or worse than the the other egg foo yung recipe.
But the expectations were set. I combed through my recipe database looking for the perfect recipe to disgust and delight my big brother. Nothing with tuna. Nothing with nuts. Dessert was out of the question. I finally landed on a Jell-O soufflé salad.
Do you know about these? My great-grandma had a pamphlet of them. There are some amazing ideas in there. I chose the Spinach Cottage Cheese Soufflé Salad.
I would like you to take a minute and really think about what I am about to describe to you. Think about the flavors and textures in your mouth.
Lemon Jell-O whipped with vinegar and mayonnaise until it is light and fluffy. Got it? Now add raw spinach, onion, celery, salt, pepper, and a generous scoop of cottage cheese. I’m guessing your first thought isn’t “yum”. And by now you have seen enough pictures to verify that it looks somewhat like curdled vomit.
Our expectations were not high and rightly so. We all dutifully helped ourselves to small portions of the light greenish chunky slime. We sat at the table and stared at each other daring each other to take the first bite of the dish that resembled old scrambled eggs. My brother took the first bite. My sister-in-law was next.
“It’s not that bad,” she declared.
I took a tentative bite. She was right. It wasn’t that bad. To be fair, my expectations were really low. This is not in any way endorsing Spinach Cottage Cheese Souffle Salad as something you should ever attempt to make or eat. It tastes and feels vaguely like if you vomited after eating cheese and whipped cream then sprayed lemon pledge on your tongue. Oddly I had expected worse. Chopping the spinach finely helped reduce any grittiness. The celery added a nice crispness to the dense and airy congealed mess. The onion added a hint of pungency.
Had I made Spinach Cottage Cheese Souffle salad expecting great results, I would’ve been sorely disappointed. As it was, it was less disgusting than I expected. I’m almost looking forward to making some of the other Souffle Salad recipes, although I think a gross Jell-O Salad dinner party may have to happen in order to get the recipes made in one shot while my inhibitions are still lowered.
The Recipe:
If you liked this you may want to check out Japanese Chicken, Peach Cottage Cheese Loaf, and Tricky Orange Dessert.
Now you have to understand, there is only one person at my house that likes cottage cheese, so we were already prejudiced against this recipe. Then we are going to add in some mayonnaise and gelatin…How could this not be a winning dish?
I had to look up what “creamed cottage cheese” was. Basically, it’s the cottage cheese anyone can get at any grocery store in the US. It has liquid in it as opposed to being dry. It’s so common, they don’t label it that way and you’d probably have to go to a specialty store to find non-creamed cottage cheese. (Or make it yourself).
Everyone was required to take a taste of the vomit-like concoction because that’s the way we do things. We try ingredients we don’t like in a variety of ways in case there is a way that we do like that ingredient. It worked with beets, mustard, brussel sprouts, and other things. The rule at our house is if you say you don’t like it without trying it, you need to eat twice as much as I would normally expect you to eat to try something. We aren’t talking huge amounts here. It’s not like I make anyone eat a double full portion, it’s more like 2 teaspoons full instead of 1 teaspoon full. The kids prefer to have control over their serving sizes, so they agree to the terms. It works for us and lessens the amount of whining at the table.