Vid erum sammála

My Thanksgiving meal went off fairly well, except the spinach dish. I've never worked with canned spinach before, plus I tried to do some sort of hybrid creamed spinach/spinach soufflé/spinach cornmeal mush. And then I added lemon flavored olive oil. It was not very good. I am going to try putting some in an omelette this morning, but otherwise, it may just go down the drain. On the other hand, my turkey turned out beautiful and the pumpkin cheesecake much better than I could have hoped, which makes me very happy.

For the meal time conversation, I implemented one of my favorite strategies. I find this strategy to be highly affective, plus it fits my optimistic, positive, problem-solving personality very well. It runs about like this: assume everyone is in agreement. Now many other people go into a family meal with the mindset of a battle, that there will be winners and losers, and that the war is never over, there is just a series of skirmishes. I don't have the patience for that, nor am I sufficiently socially-oriented to put the kind of mental energy required into keeping track of the score in a long-running debate. Instead, I make the assumption that we are all reasonable people, and that whatever gyrations explored were done so only to reach a the best and most common sense conclusion. The goal is a consensus opinion, which I feel we reached on Thursday. 

Namely, that my spinach dish was terrible.

Actually, it was more serious than that, it was about the stuffing. But the thing is, I remember a thanksgiving seven years ago when my sister highly recommended mushrooms in the stuffing. So whatever complaint she had this year about my mushroom cornbread stuffing, I just completely ignored. She had her side dish of artificial, prepackaged stovetop, and that's her choice. But real homemade stuffing with mushrooms, baked inside the cavity of the turkey, is not anything I am going to accept criticism about or be defensive about. It was the right thing to do and will always be and has always been the right thing to do. Even if a few years ago I put an onion in the turkey and tried baked southern "dressing" instead of stuffing. I have reached a consensus that mushroom cornmeal stuffing is proper, tasty, natural, and best, and I am comfortable with the assumption that everyone agrees. It certainly was eaten up on Thursday, end of story. 

That's the way I move forward. 

Comments

Jono said…
Maybe you should have done a spinach quiche since Thanksgiving has a pie theme going. Maybe having it on eggs for breakfast is essentially the same thing. It didn't SOUND like it wouldn't be good. Glad there was minimal conflict. I think that was one of the original tenets of Thanksgiving, although I wasn't there. I'm not that old.

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