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.
And now I have an idea for a roasted pineapple and toasted coconut something…cocktail? Bread? Meringue Pie? This is an ongoing problem. I start out doing something and then get majorly inspired by something completely different and get too excited to start that and want to forget about what it was I was doing in the first place. I am working harder at trying to finish things before I start something new. It’s killing me in my knitting right now. The biggest problem I have is that I have too many ideas and there is only me that can carry them out. It’s all just time and money, right?
Ok, back on track. A couple of things to note. Pineapple tidbits or crushed pineapple probably works better than pineapple chunks. And if you haven’t read the Jell-O package (and these are small ones, not big ones in this recipe), do not attempt to use fresh pineapple. Most tropical fruits contain enzymes which counteract the gelling property of gelatin. If you want something like a slimy soup, that’s probably fine, but even despite my protests of not caring for Jell-O, I still prefer it to be gelled. The enzymes are useful for other things, though, like tenderizing meat (mmmm…al pastor). But this is also the same thing that makes some people very sensitive to eating too much raw fruit. 
Also…The topping of the Tropical Delight Salad is really good. Don’t skip that step. Even if you decide you want to change the flavor of the Jell-O, or decide not to use bananas, or oranges, do not change the topping. 
At the time, I had no idea that this version of frozen salad existed. For some reason I associate butter mints and salted peanuts with old ladies (or ladies that seemed very old when I was very young). The addition of canned pineapple and marshmallows combined into a creamy frozen Jell-O salad solidifies that feeling. It’s both disgusting and wonderful all at the same time. One of those guilty pleasures. The nuts add a bit of crunch and texture. The mints kind of bring everything together and make it really refreshing in an unexpected way.
The cake stuck to the pan and broke. It didn’t look pretty any more. I had enough stuff going on that I just didn’t bother to try to make this into something better. I’m sure that part of this was that I had just gotten laid off from my job and didn’t have any specific prospects lined up. Had I been my normal self, I would’ve rallied and taken the broken cake and some whipped cream or pudding and turned it into some sort of wonderful trifle like I did with the pistachio cake and fig jam, but I just wasn’t there.
Frosty Lemon Salad is refreshing in a way you wouldn’t normally think of. Cucumbers fresh from our garden, and celery make a nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the pineapple. I did not serve with lettuce and cherries. The creamy layer was a bit loose, as you can see. No one complained that this was gross, so it must’ve been ok. (Mom just told me that it was Martin VanBuren and his set that coined the term O.K., who knew?)
When I was a young girl, I read a book by Lois Lenski called Berries in the Scoop. I was intrigued by the notion of cranberry bogs and how cranberries were harvested. In the story a little girl loses her grandmother’s pin in the cranberry bogs and ***Spoiler alert*** after she falls on the ice and injures herself while ice skating on the bogs she finds it and they all live happily ever after. Or maybe they do. I mean, once you injure your ankle it never goes back to exactly how it used to be.
This recipe is beautiful. There is something about that deep red color. John says this recipe reminds him of really good fruit cocktail. It’s somehow light and refreshing despite having that tartness of cranberries. The pineapple adds sweetness, the nuts add crunch and depth. The grapes just lighten everything up. Serve this up with some whipped cream. Or be like Caroline and dip your pork chops in it. It’s a good side for roasted meats.
