Purchasing a Deviled Egg Platter from Walmart

24 eggs, porcelain, white, free shipping.. I'm in!

So, I'm having my two bosses, their wives and one of the VP's in my company and his wife over in a couple of weeks for a barbecue. One of the hors d'oeuvres at this affair is going to be une variété d'oeufs farcis (stuffed eggs). I'm going to stuff them with a variety of egg-based stuffings. I really love stuffed eggs and I rarely make them because, up until recently, I could never find a cooking method that would produce boiled eggs that were tender, not green and easy to peel. I have since solved that problem but that is, as they say, another story. One thing I dislike about serving stuffed eggs is that they are very slippery and they have a tendency to slip and slide across the tray when you try to serve them. So, I decided to look online for a nice plain, white porcelain deviled egg platter to serve them. I found just what I was looking for at Walmart.

I ordered this thing and it came in the mail today. Now I am not what one would call an environmentalist by any stretch but what I discovered when I got home today was completely ridiculous. I saw this enormous box from Walmart and thought that "this could not possibly be the small egg platter that I ordered. What could this be?"

The amount of packaging to send this platter to me was so ridiculous, mainly because it was so ineffective. Those little cardboard things that they are now substituting for peanuts are not working for them and the box was just too damned big! I like the old days when they placed some nice gray foam in the box that cradled your dish so that it arrived safely without having to schlep a huge box home from the Dennis Post Office that didn't work in the first place. 

So now I have ordered a replacement egg platter from them and am having them deliver it to the closest Walmart, in Falmouth, Cape Cod. Now as some of you may know, from Memorial Day to Columbus Day, on Cape Cod, driving anywhere between the hours of 8am and 10pm is like trying to drive from Manhattan to Fire Island on a Friday afternoon. The Cape is so packed with tourists that it's like a very fat woman popping out of a girdle. I am not looking forward to going all the way to Falmouth to exchange this platter with the remains of my first one, but I hate eggs slipping around a serving plate more. 

Wish me luck!