![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I forgot to add a few things to my post yesterday - Thanksgiving dinner in northern Indiana wouldn't be complete without 'em.
First - euchre. You know you're in northern Indiana or Michigan when dinner's over and someone proposes a game of euchre. I often think people outside of this area don't even know what it is, though my nephew says his friends from northern Illinois are also familiar with it. It's a card game involving one deck of cards with lower numbers removed, partners, bids, trumps, tricks - I've heard it called poor man's bridge before. Actually, I wasn't familiar with euchre as a child because my mom's family wouldn't use real playing cards (anyone else remember Rook cards?), though they've gotten over that, and my dad's family played Scrabble. (From which I always abstain. I hate Scrabble. For someone who reads and writes as much as I do, I am ridiculously bad at it.) So of course euchre was mentioned yesterday, though no one was playing it when we left.* (Huh, Wikipedia says it's more widely known than I thought - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euchre - though my sister's boyfriend and his sons, who are from Ohio, had never heard of it.)
And then there's the lime jello salad. What is up with that? I don't think a potluck dinner in the upper Midwest is complete without a lime jello salad and honestly I think it's one of the most revolting things ever to come from a jello box. Lime jello in and of itself is just not something I would eat anyway, unless I were starving. And then to add things to it - usually, but not always - a conglomeration of shredded carrots, mayonnaise, and maybe nuts. It's just wrong. The salad there yesterday was a little different from the usual, but I didn't investigate it thoroughly. I don't know, maybe it's a Hoosier thing, because one of my aunts always brings one and most of the family will eat it, but I don't recall seeing one at any of my dad's family gatherings and both my sisters and I hate it. (We're all Michigan-born and bred, though we moved here in 1976.) I wonder who the first person was that looked at a box of lime jello and said, "I know! I'll stir in a heap of shredded carrots before it sets, pop it in a mold, and frost the top with mayonnaise when it's done. Oooh, maybe some walnuts in with the carrots, too!"
Looks like it may have been the jello people:
I'd completely forgotten about the cottage cheese....
Another one:
Looks like it has some sort of mayonnaise sauce to spoon over a serving.
And this one, with cucumbers in it, was new to me:
I'll stick to the pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes, thanks!
*Instead of euchre, my niece, nephew, and sister's boyfriend's sons played bullshit, which I'd first hear of in some movie with Kate Hudson in it, though I've never known anyone who played it. It definitely caused some stuttering and scrambling for euphemisms when my grandfather came by and asked what they were playing! I think it would've been easier to stick to euchre!
First - euchre. You know you're in northern Indiana or Michigan when dinner's over and someone proposes a game of euchre. I often think people outside of this area don't even know what it is, though my nephew says his friends from northern Illinois are also familiar with it. It's a card game involving one deck of cards with lower numbers removed, partners, bids, trumps, tricks - I've heard it called poor man's bridge before. Actually, I wasn't familiar with euchre as a child because my mom's family wouldn't use real playing cards (anyone else remember Rook cards?), though they've gotten over that, and my dad's family played Scrabble. (From which I always abstain. I hate Scrabble. For someone who reads and writes as much as I do, I am ridiculously bad at it.) So of course euchre was mentioned yesterday, though no one was playing it when we left.* (Huh, Wikipedia says it's more widely known than I thought - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euchre - though my sister's boyfriend and his sons, who are from Ohio, had never heard of it.)
And then there's the lime jello salad. What is up with that? I don't think a potluck dinner in the upper Midwest is complete without a lime jello salad and honestly I think it's one of the most revolting things ever to come from a jello box. Lime jello in and of itself is just not something I would eat anyway, unless I were starving. And then to add things to it - usually, but not always - a conglomeration of shredded carrots, mayonnaise, and maybe nuts. It's just wrong. The salad there yesterday was a little different from the usual, but I didn't investigate it thoroughly. I don't know, maybe it's a Hoosier thing, because one of my aunts always brings one and most of the family will eat it, but I don't recall seeing one at any of my dad's family gatherings and both my sisters and I hate it. (We're all Michigan-born and bred, though we moved here in 1976.) I wonder who the first person was that looked at a box of lime jello and said, "I know! I'll stir in a heap of shredded carrots before it sets, pop it in a mold, and frost the top with mayonnaise when it's done. Oooh, maybe some walnuts in with the carrots, too!"
Looks like it may have been the jello people:
I'd completely forgotten about the cottage cheese....
Another one:
Looks like it has some sort of mayonnaise sauce to spoon over a serving.
And this one, with cucumbers in it, was new to me:
I'll stick to the pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes, thanks!
*Instead of euchre, my niece, nephew, and sister's boyfriend's sons played bullshit, which I'd first hear of in some movie with Kate Hudson in it, though I've never known anyone who played it. It definitely caused some stuttering and scrambling for euphemisms when my grandfather came by and asked what they were playing! I think it would've been easier to stick to euchre!
