It's party season,
and I am afraid. Everyone brings dishes
to share, and no one wants to provide anything that might be seen as
boring, comforting, or safe.
I am afraid of dishes embellished with pomegranate and
cranberry. Yes indeed, those are lovely
reds, but I don't want to see them touching
my green beans, asparagus, artichoke, or
romaine lettuce.
I'm afraid of glazed hams adorned with slices of pineapple
and maraschino cherry. I'm horrified by miniature
meatballs resting in a light brown sweet sauce accented by currants and raisins.
I'm appalled by fried tofu, which bears a startling resemblance to hockey pucks
and may actually taste like hockey pucks. I haven't been tempted to try them.
I think breaded fish
fingers and chicken nuggets might
possibly be safe to eat if one person
prepared them from beginning to end, but most likely these items have
come from the test kitchens of major corporations and contain a smorgasbord of
ingredients that, if properly combined, could make plastic, or a highly toxic poison.
I'm afraid of Spam and Cheez
Whiz on crackers, a fad which has mercifully died or is on its last
legs. Cheez Whiz is now a homemade stain
remover for greasy stains. If that doesn't make you think twice before using it
as a condiment, nothing will.
Raw veggies come in a variety of colors and can be dipped
into a variety of things (if you spoon those things onto your plate, that is, because sharing dips at a party is a good way to spread germs) but artistic
arrangements --nay, sculptures-- are off putting. Who wants to be the first to
remove Abe Lincoln's broccoli eyebrow, or George Washington's cauliflower hair?
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| Salami, pickle and cheese kebabs are suggested party food at Betty Crocker holiday |
Spinach and artichoke dip from the freezer section, with a salt content marginally lower than that for the Dead Sea,
was the fad a few years ago. May it never reach true food status, as salsa ,
hummus, and pesto have.
People get very coy about the ingredients of their showpiece
dishes. Perhaps an ingredients checklist could go with each dish: This contains
No Nuts, shellfish, HCFC, GMA,
polysorbate 60, red dye. Then again, perhaps someone will devise a dish
that will contain all those things , and those who eat it will be issued cards
that say "Proceed immediately to the emergency room."
Trendy, iconic, and amazing are words I don't really want to
see again, but iconic foods can't be all that bad. Chocolate chip cookies, fudge,
brownies, are iconic foods. Sorta like
Mom's apple pie. My own mother abandoned pie-making when I was 12, claiming that I could make better piecrust than she could.(Blatant
excuse!) But pie is messy to serve. Tarts would be nice.
I'm not precisely sure what makes up today's marshmallows,
but extracts from mallow plants are not among the ingredients. Still, I do not want to see marshmallows adorning raw salads, baked vegetables, cakes or pies. The proper way to use a marshmallow is to
partially char it, and eat it nude and unadorned, preferably at a camp fire.
