Putting together the perfect Thanksgiving plate takes years of practice and a bit of luck. Your mashed-potato wall needs to hold back the gravy. Your cranberry sauce needs to be solid enough not to leak into everything. And you need plate discipline -- the strength to avoid selecting too much of any one thing.
But perfection is always out of our grasp and will be until we have the power to banish a single Thanksgiving side from the table. My candidate? The green bean casserole.
I'll be steaming along, loading up the stuffing and the sweet potatoes, when I suddenly get to a casserole pan that is the equivalent of a guy bunting to get on base during a no hitter. When the host plops down a squelchy blop of green bean casserole with the pungent odor of mushroom soup and fried onions that have long ceased to be crispy, that perfect Thanksgiving plate goes out the window.
Instead, I end up eating around the tan-green mound and wishing that it could be extracted from the Thanksgiving tradition. Green beans are what you bribe your children to eat. How did they possibly earn a seat at the holiday table? It's time they were banished to the back of the cupboard, where they belong.
So you've got one wave of the magic spatula, Fat City readers. Which side dish gets the boot?
[Image via Flickr: roy_]
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"tan-green"? How about gray-green? Definitely a dish that his outlived its usefulness.
I'm with whoever mentioned the marshmallow, caramalized sweet potato monstrosity. I don't need something so insanely sweet when there's pie staring at me at the end of the dish. Not to mention I've had family members really REALLY screw up that dish. Yuck, yuck, and another yuck.
Any canned food product or ingredient should be totally banned-blecch, blecch, & double blecch! (and that includes mooshy ol' oysters!)
Obviously, my family would vote for homemade cranberry sauce, because I made a batch and brought all but one spoonful home with me. But they ate a whole can of that gelatinous jellied glop.
It's fine, I'm not hurt, I just added some to my waffle batter and made some incredible waffles.
As for me, I could do without the candied yams -- blecch.
Ixnay on the eans-bay. I love the canned jellied cranberry sauce, the marshmallow yams and the oyster dressing, but I could never understand why somebody would ruin perfectly good green beans with mushroom soup and canned onions. Yuck!
I'll take the green bean cassarole if I can avoid that purple canned cranberry sauce. It takes over everything it touches and it doesn't help that it's tart juices oooze everywhere.
The only good thing about it is the fact that people invented sectioned food trays to avoid it tainting everything.
Agree with the green bean casserole, not because i think it tastes bad (which i don't), but because it's so... 70's. We can do better in this day and age.
But the real abomination is that heinous marshmallow-covered sugary yam dish. Who is responsible for this dish? Pumpkin and pecan pie are good enough, and serve their rightful place as the traditional dessert. The sweet, soggy yam casserole and its styrofoam coating on top is beyond superfluous. It's inexcusable.
Oh for the love of Indians and Pilgrims! Green Bean Casserole is wonder-fricken-ful...you must be making it wrong. Put the cranberry sauce and dark meat in the trash; use the sweet potatoes for sp fries. Happy Thanksgiving Everybody!
Mashed potatoes; they're just not that special. I don't think I would notice if they were gone on Thanksgiving.
Dear God in Heaven you are so right about green bean casserole. My mom has made it for all the big holidays since I was a little kid. Sadly everyone loves that nasty crap except me. I learned to eat dinner very slowly so I would be the last one at the table. After everyone left I would sneak it to the kitchen and stuff it in the garbage disposal where it belonged.
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