Monday, November 26, 2007

Anglo-giving

So last Thursday was my attempt at recreating a traditional Thanksgiving dinner in a tiny London kitchen to be served after work. While lacking in many of the traditional Thanksgiving elements, I believe I managed to get the general gist of the food consumption bit across.

First I'll go over the positives. I was able to get just the right amount of boneless turkey breast from Whole Foods as my recipe required, and was somehow able to figure out how to a) make stuffing, b) 'butterfly' a giant chunk of meat, c) get the turkey breast tied up again once the stuffing had been put into it. All three of these things were minor miracles. It took ages to cook, but thanks to my newly acquired meat thermometer, it turned out edible in the end. I didn't have a single pot big enough to make mashed potatoes for 6 people, so I made two smaller pots, combining them for the garlic/milk/butter combining process at the end. The remnants of the spillage from that will be cleaned off the stove soon, I'm sure. I also managed to have too much food, which I think is also key, so no one went hungry and indeed were grumbling about how full they were.

Now the things that weren't quite right. Primarily, I not only had to go to work on Thanksgiving, but the day after as well. What's up with that. We should have some sort of diplomatic agreement between our countries entitling me to having American holidays off of work. Then there was the fact that there were not endless football games on tv, that I actually had to do all the cooking instead of sitting around watching said tv, and scouting trips were required to locate all the required ingredients instead of being able to buy them from any and all grocery stores. I think in all, 5 grocery store trips were made.

In other news, I went to kickboxing class (aka, 'body combat') on Saturday. And apparently all that 'punching' and 'hair-pulling' is effective as my arms and shoulders are really sore!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your Thanksgiving dinner sounded wonderful. Good job! You'll have to make friends with some other Americans so you can trade off with the cooking bit.