Happy Thanksgiving!

I've spent the afternoon eating stuffing and pretending like I'm going to have an appetite for all of the food that I've been making. (But really, let's be honest, it's all about the stuffing. And the cranberry sauce.)

Hey, guess what? My VISA SHOWED UP TODAY! So I'm good to go until November 18, 2011 now! And all that work that I've been doing? ALL of it is legal now! Woo!

We're having Thanksgiving at Sarah and Dave's place this year since A: they have the biggest living room/dining space and B: Sarah's parents are here, which is great because they are fun. There is going to be about 14 people there (Will there be enough chairs? No.) and since this year there are going to be a number of meat eaters- I've put myself in charge of the turkey again. Finding a turkey in London...

There was a giant turkey breast for sale at Morrisons, but since it was 35 (!) GBP, I thought...no. Tesco's had a sale on Chickens: 3 for ten quid, so I did that and then bought a couple of giant turkey legs since I figure that white meat is white meat, but turkey dark meat and chicken dark meat are *different.*

Currently in the oven I have two chickens, one turkey leg, and a rolled up roast of turkey breast. On top of the stove I've got one small casserole filled with stuffing and one loaf pan filled with stuffing (the loaf pan is staying at my flat so that Ella and I can have left overs.) The brussels sprouts aren't done yet, the corn bread and cranberry sauce was made yesterday, and this blog entry is turning in to a to do list for me...but that's still fun reading, right?!

Cranberries were hard to find this year, probably because I'm no longer living or going to school right next to a fancy, expensive grocery store. I managed to find *one* package so there is only a very small batch of cranberry sauce this year. (I may horde it. I'm not making any promises.)

I hope you all enjoy your Thanksgiving and have a wonderful holiday!

Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving was wonderful. We had it at my flat and the kitchen is just perfectly sized for a bustling eight person party where everyone is helping to prepare the food and talking over each other and catching up and generally having a wonderful time.

The party came together rather last minute after many permutations of people, locations, and events. We ended up with nine people over the course of the evening- the old school dinner club folk and some new people as well. Meredith, my old flat mate; Tim, her boyfriend; Dave; Sarah who was visiting from America; “Other Tim”, Dave’s friend and new dinner club initiate; Jon; Latana; my friend Kanika whom I stayed with this summer; and myself.

Everyone brought various parts of the feast. We were too last minute to actually get a turkey to defrost, which is probably a good thing since we ate barely a quarter of what I did purchase which was a giant turkey leg and a couple of turkey breast roasts from the meat section at Morrissons (the very good grocery store a short bus ride away from the flat). Everyone showed up about an hour later than they said they would which worked out just fine because it meant that I had time to clean my room and the kitchen and make sure all the dishes were clean and ready to use and things like that.

Dave, Sarah, and Other Tim showed up with bags of vegetables, stuffing mix, and two bags of marshmallows which- for some reason- in England only come in mixed pink and white varieties which is unfortunate as the pink ones are strawberry flavored and gross as we discovered earlier this week when trying to introduce Dave to s’mores. Jon showed up shortly thereafter and was immediately sent back out into the cold to purchase various things that we kept discovering we didn’t actually need once he had already left the house. (This was an unfortunate pattern; I think we sent him out three times.) We had things boiling on every burner and three levels of things baking in the oven. It was a good thing the turkey wasn’t a real turkey as it was much flatter than would otherwise be the case and meant we had more room to shove other things in the oven like stuffing, cheese balls, parsnips, etc.

Meredith and Tim showed up with a vegetarian shepherd’s pie, the aforementioned cheese balls, and three pies made from scratch including two pumpkin pies that they had made from an actual pumpkin. I was very impressed.

Latana showed up right as the food was being laid out which was perfect timing on her part. We cleared off the side board and had platters, sauce pans, and casseroles full of food all over the kitchen. (Meat and veggie versions of everything.) People were serving across the table so that there was this lovely pattern of arms across the table which went nicely with fretwork’s consort music in the background.

The best part though, was that at the end after all the food and the pies and the ice cream everyone cleaned up! There was a giant assembly line of dishwashers, dish dryers, leftovers patrol, counter clearers, and one very special garbage man. It was brilliant, they even scrubbed the roasting pan-all while screaming/singing along to Ben Folds and Bruce Springsteen. Impromtu dance parties were clearly taking place.

All and all a brilliant success- everyone agreed the food was better this year and thought it was A-okay that we neglected to do hand turkeys.

Thanksgiving

I'm not sure how many people we ended up feeding over the course of this Saturday, but it was over 16. Which I think is pretty darn impressive for a dorm kitchen. We made everything on one stove and with one oven. The maintenance people are replacing a lot of the kitchen furniture in various flats, and currently have it stored under the stairs, which was handy for us because it meant that we had access to a bunch of extra tables and chairs which we liberated for the day.

The pies and cranberry sauce had all been made the previous day, and I got up at 8am to start the turkey cooking. To be fair, I promptly went back to sleep- but still! 8am! Meredith and Tim made all the mashed potatoes and stuffing and sweet potato casserole and cornbread. When Sarah arrived she brought marshmallows and cans of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup from America for the sweet potato casserole and green bean casserole. We had to be authentic you know. (The French kids asked if all the food was authentic: yes- very. Impressively so.) Anyhow, enough with the self congratulations. (But it was pretty awesome. Gotta say.)

The other thing we did was resurrect a tradition from elementary school- namely tracing your hand and making a turkey out of it. We made everyone do it and then write their name and what they were thankful for before blue tacing it to the wall. The non-Americans kept asking if this was something we did with our families...no, not really. But everything else is totally like a normal Thanksgiving! We swear!

Before dessert we realized that there were eight countries represented, so I passed around a piece of paper to have people draw their flags on it. It was interesting to realize how much of a cult around the flag America has. Regardless of how patriotic you are, all Americans just know what the flag looks like. This is *really* not true for the rest of the world. Lawrence, who is from South Africa had to look his flag up online and even so forgot what it looked like. Dorothy, who is from Germany kept holding up the red, yellow, and black markers in different orders to see if she could remember what her flag looked like.

Someone asked Komsun to sing Thailand's national anthem so he did and then the French kids sang theirs. It was about 20 seconds in to a very loud rendition of the French anthem that I realized that all three of them were voice majors at Guildhall. The Americans tried to sing our anthem but Dave kept butting in and saying we were singing "God Save the Queen" which of course we were because none of us really remembered the words and were mostly just humming. Plus, after the rousing French we really couldn't compete.

I put up all the photos I took on flickr: http://flickr.com/photos/10933141@N07/

The pictures that are here are of Dave immediately understanding the whole point of Thanksgiving, a spelling war played out in hand turkeys, the turkey (that I didn't realize was upside down until I started trying to carve it, oops), and my hand turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We had meetings with Sig today to find out how we're doing with the programme. She brought the Americans chocolate- and it was tasty, if not terribly idiomatic.

Attempting to post a picture...

Yay! Look! It worked! This picture is from Thanksgiving this year at Emma Shubin's house. It was a good time, bunches of fun. I helped her dad dig for potatoes. (This apparently held no interest to her, since she grew up with a vegetable patch, but was new and maybe a little overly exciting for me.) Also, they have a deaf dog named Uma. They call her "Uma bear" which it occurs to me may have been the origin of my adding "bear" at the end of everyone's name...

London in two days (or one day if you consider that I am posting this at 11:30, which is very nearly mid-night which means that it is very nearly tuesday)