make a meal of vs take the trouble

make a meal of

verb
  • To spend more time and energy on some task than it warrants; to make something overly complicated; to make a big thing out of. 

  • To eat something as a meal. 

take the trouble

verb
  • To make the effort (to do something); to bother. 

How often have the words make a meal of and take the trouble occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )