The Easter Choppy

This last weekend, I hosted Easter for my family, which was also the first time I had hosted a holiday dinner for my family. While my family is great and would have (probably) been happy even if I had completely messed up Easter dinner and had to order pizza, that didn’t prevent me from worrying about messing up the dinner in any number of ways. Here are a few of the many things I worried would go wrong (some more likely to happen than others):

1. Making an absolutely inedible dinner.
2. Accidentally burning down the house.
3. Not getting all of the food on the table at the same time.
4. Purposely burning down the house due to stress.

If nothing else, I was pretty sure I had enough butter. Though not entirely sure.

Happily, none of these worries came to be. Unfortunately, entirely different (and unforeseen) problems occurred.

First, early in the week, I realized that I had six sets of china. All fine and dandy if you have six or fewer people coming to Easter dinner.

I had seven.

Thankfully, I have the Internet and a credit card and a willingness to spend a somewhat obscene amount of money on overnight delivery of two dishes so that I won’t have to serve Easter dinner on non-matching plates.

In related news, I sometimes have certain obsessive-compulsive tendencies when it comes to matching.

Second, and probably something I should have realized far earlier than I did, were the appliances. Specifically, the microwave and the dishwasher.

This requires a bit of explanation. You see, I generally don’t use a microwave. I feel like I can taste the microwave in food, and besides, the oven and stove handle all the same tasks, so it’s really not necessary. And I also don’t use the dishwasher. It’s just me, and even when I am baking, I don’t use enough dishes to really justify using the dishwasher.

Which provides at least some explanation why I have lived for the last two years stepping over a built-in microwave sitting on the floor of my kitchen (rather than installed and usable) and the last four years with a broken dishwasher gathering dust and taking up space in the kitchen.

With less than a week until Easter, I decided I should do something about both of these things. Which is how I found myself at Lowe’s on the Wednesday before Easter, buying the only dishwasher in stock that somewhat matched the rest of my appliances and spending most of Thursday watching people install said dishwasher and the microwave in my kitchen, when I could have been using that time to prepare food and otherwise get ready for Easter dinner.

(Note: I still haven’t used the microwave, and it may not even work. Though the dishwasher got lots of use over the weekend, even though I haven’t used it again since my family left).

Choppy wonders just what this whole microwave thing is about, not having ever had one before. And, more importantly, she probably wonders whether it will make her anything good to eat.

And the third (and by far worst) unforeseen problem: getting food poisoning from Saturday’s supper that bleeds over into Sunday when I am supposed to be preparing Easter.

Saturday night, after getting back from a nice dinner out, my mom complained about being sick from something she ate (at the restaurant, not something I made. Thankfully. I really should have put that on the list of things to worry about. Don’t worry, it will definitely be on the list for next time). Overnight, my dad felt bad for the same reason. My sister would feel the same way the next day.

And sometime, a mere couple hours before I was supposed to be up and starting the slow cooker, it hit me.

I won’t get into the gruesome details (trust me, you don’t want to hear them, and I don’t want to relive them), but it was not good. And it was not conducive to making food. Or, for that matter, sitting up. Or doing anything other than lying down (and even that was not entirely pleasant).

That said, a week of planning and preparation was not going to go to waste.

Look at that centerpiece I made. Like I was going to let that go to waste.

And so, I managed to get through getting dinner on the table. It was edible. No food poisoning (that I know of). All the food made it to the table at the same time. All in all, a success.

Though next time, I am going to hope I don’t get food poisoning.

Choppy may have enjoyed the Easter dinner, though I am pretty sure she did not enjoy this part of Easter. At all.