Weekly Kvetch: Christmas Menus and Salad Dressing

Ya filthy animal...

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Welcome to the latest kvetch. This week, I’m pointing out something as an observer and nothing else. I don’t celebrate Christmas but I enjoy it from the outside looking in. Yet the whole Christmas menu thing bothers and often confuses me. I don’t want to tell anybody how to celebrate the birth of their lord, but if I’m doing a Christmas dinner, I’m going full feast. I’m not doing Thanksgiving 2.0; I’m going Ghost of Christmas Present in Mickey's Christmas Carol with beautiful food just falling out of bowls. A spread worthy of inclusion on Tables Tables Tables, except it’s not minced pies and that chocolate pot roast with the… pistachio—I’m going full fish. That’s right, Italian-American Catholic or not, I think everybody should get down with the Feast of the Seven Fishes. It is truly the most genius holiday dinner I can think of. Start with a nice shrimp cocktail, maybe some oysters, some cod balls covered in a homemade red sauce, and maybe linguine with clams. Get crazy. Make a fish soup, cure some salmon, or, hell, read this piece by Helen Rosner and get inspired to build your own seafood tower that nearly touches the ceiling. I’ve seen a few restaurants that don’t typically serve Italian getting more into this. Sami & Susu, a favorite of mine in Manhattan, has a beautiful and fun Christmas Eve menu filled with stuff from the sea.

All people do is kvetch about all the weight they put on between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I think it’s silly to complain about eating too much if you’re enjoying it, but the Feast of Seven Fishes at least feels a little less gluttonous while being luxurious at the same time. It’s all rooted in the idea of “abstaining” from meat, so you can lie to yourself and say you did something maybe a little healthier if that’s going to make you feel better.

Reader Kvetch of the Week: Too Much Salad Dressing

This week’s kvetch is from Kelso McNaught in Concord, NH. Since my kvetch is about food, it felt appropriate to use Kelso’s kvetch since it’s about something I also kvetch about a lot: salad dressing. If you’ve got a kvetch, send it to weeklykvetch@gmail.com

Specifically, people who use too much dressing on a salad. I have a client who drowns his chef salads in bacon bits and what I can only describe as half a gallon of creamy ranch. Look, I get it. Nobody likes raw digging dry-ass ruffage at lunchtime, but balance is key! Whatdaya doing?? Making a fuckin ranch soup?! Balance it out with a good vinaigrette or AT LEAST make sure you see some green in your damn salad! If you start eating your salad with a spoon then you need to go straight to jail!

Furthermore, what in the absolute hell are bacon leavings doing on any salad? A "bacon bit"? Sweetie, those are the crumbs I left after eating my BLT. Absolutely feral. Use croutons like a civilized person. 

-Kelso

Dear Kelso,

Oy, I couldn’t agree with you more. I generally think the way we treat all salad in this country is borderline criminal. A wise person I know (my wife) talks a lot about “Punishment Salads,” and how most salads are ordered out of some sense of guilt that the person ordering feels about trying to “eat healthy.” What I find, more often than not, is these punishment salads are almost always loaded with dressing and I can’t understand what the point was in the first place.

As somebody who is guilty of maybe dressing his own salads up a little too much in the past, I can say that whenever it’s a conscious decision, and I squeeze the ranch bottle a little tighter, it’s almost always because the salad sucks. Plain and simple. The leaves are wimpy or the tomatoes are sad, and the couple of cucumber bits tossed in only make it taste more like they didn’t dry off the leaves after they (hopefully) washed them. I blame the bad salad that people feel the need to drown in dressing on two things:

1. Crap produce. A problem most Americans seem too OK with.

2. Lack of imagination on the part of the person making the salad.

I’ve written in the past about the problem with too much lettuce on a sandwich, and I think that the sandwich also suffers from the same problem salads do, except the lettuce you get on a sandwich often has no dressing and no taste. I think the way we treat our lettuce says a lot about how we feel about ourselves, and I wish we started taking care of ourselves and our lettuce a little better, so thank you for bringing this up!