I was vastly amused this Thanksgiving because while my fiance and I usually go to her mom's for dinner, this year her grandmother is in a wheelchair so we had to go to her aunt and uncle's instead (their house is a lot more wheelchair accessible). Her mom and her partner are complete foody/gourmets who are constantly derisive of any food that doesn't measure up to their standards, no matter how free the food is. (What, you're feeding me for free, and all you bought was sandwich fixings, a salami and cheese plate, 3 types of olives and marinated vegetables, 2 different types of salad, and a cake? For shame...) Unfortunately, the two of them being catty, bitter, jaded old bitches (my fiance agrees with me on this point so I can say it out loud), who argue non-stop whenever they're in the kitchen together, their cooking tends to suck. And it's that special kind of crappy food where they've managed to take a very good recipe, get all of the techniques almost perfect, and use craptastically cheap ingredients so the entire dish is almost really good, but winds up sucking utterly instead. Or you know, they just over-cook the food to death. I don't think I've ever had brussels sprouts as bad as they manage to make every year, because they cook them down to a consistancy you could probably eat through a straw.
Her aunt and uncle, on the other hand, are very laid back, easy-going people, who don't act like teen girl frenemies in the kitchen. Also, while they appreciate a tasty meal, they both work long hours and have better things to do than spend all day in the kitchen trying to make the perfect chicken fried steak (The result they came up with was abysmal. While Ashburner's chicken steak with french fried onions sounds awesome, using onion powder to season the steak, onion powder to season the breading, and 3 or 4 whole onions in the gravy makes an onion fried steak, not a chicken fried steak.). So instead of having a "gourmet" dinner, we had stuffed turkey breasts, prime rib that had been pre-cooked by Costco (giant warehouse wholesale club), two different kinds of stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberry sauce with real berries instead of the canned stuff, mashed purple potatoes with gruyere cheese, and a green salad with warm bacon dressing (all of which were either bought pre-prepped or made from Rachel Ray and other Food Network stars' recipes), which were all awesome; and really horrible brussels sprouts which were made by the two gourmets. Plus, as an added bonus, any time her mothers tried to tell her aunt that she was doing something wrong, she just looked at them with a completely blissed out expression and said "Rachel says to do it this way, and this is how I like it," and went right on doing it how she was doing it.
We laughed all the way home.