Apr 6, 2018 3 min read

The Easter ham was a 15-pounder, dressed up in brown sugar and mustard and cooked in the oven for four hours. Generally, I’m not a ham person, but on Sunday I was.

What came out of that oven was meat the color of raspberry sorbet and the texture of filet mignon. Our guests descended upon it as hungrily as we hoped they would. Even my son, who never was a ham person, devoured big slices of it.

And now here we are, a few days past Easter, and there is no leftover ham in my refrigerator. Normally, at this point post-hosting, my fridge is full of plastic containers stuffed with all the food that didn’t go. Last Easter, there was so much ham left over we jammed big slices of it into plastic bags and put it in the downstairs freezer.

There are no leftovers – of ham or anything else – this year, and I’m left to wonder why.

The farmer and I hosted 13 people. Maybe they were hungrier than usual. The weather has been unusually cold, and people generally eat more in the winter. How else to explain the pudge we emerge into spring with each year?

Another explanation might be my excellent procurement of plastic containers. Looking for inexpensive Easter basket grass, I went to the dollar store and came out with the usual: $25 worth of plastic objects, including containers with lids. At the grocery store, those things are a few bucks apiece. The dollar store offers them up at something like 100 containers for a penny.

We’re all familiar with guests’ post-party scramble to get out the door. At our parties, it seems to happen in a 10-minute swirl of activity.

“Take food,” I announce, and I begin opening cabinets looking for containers. My mom comes prepared, bearing bags full of empty Cool Whip tubs. I fill them up and send my folks on their way with enough food to cover a few lunches and maybe a dinner.

The young 20-somethings in the family are happy to take some food. Whatever plastic containers I have on hand go to them.

The rest of the group, by then their bellies round and full of the embarrassing array of desserts, grab their midsections and say, “No thanks, I’ve had enough.”

“You’ll be hungry in a few hours and wish you had some ham for a sandwich,” I’ll say.

This time, they took me up on all of it: the ham, the crunchy Asian coleslaw, the hash brown potatoes casserole, the sweet little Hawaiian rolls, the cheesecake.

As I washed the dishes after everyone had gone, I decided that maybe the food was really that delicious this time. Almost everybody left with a container of something.

Except for the Jell-O pretzel salad, my favorite. As soon as people started leaving the dinner table, in a totally greedy move, I hurried the pan of it into the fridge.

There were two squares of it left. They didn’t survive the evening. Somewhere around 9:30, with the dishes done, the extra leaf removed from the table and the extra chairs tucked away, I sat down with a spoon and ate the Jell-O right out of the pan. It was cool and creamy, salty and crunchy and totally delicious.

But what I really wanted was a leftover ham sandwich.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.