Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Thanksgiving in Kaifeng

Last week was Thanksgiving. And even here in China, we had a real one-- we'd been preparing for about a week, deciding what food we should (attempt) to make and what we needed to buy online. None of us have made Thanksgiving dinner, or HAD a real Thanksgiving away from our families (I did miss it when I was abroad in Japan), so this was a new thing for us all.

We agreed that the courses would be: turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, cranberries, corn, rolls, and pumpkin pie w/ whipped cream. We knew immediately that the turkey would HAVE to be bought online, and for a wild few days we actually considered getting a LIVE turkey. That was obviously voted down and we purchased a frozen one off taobao (a Chinese site kind of like ebay). Along with the turkey, we also got cranberries, and brownie mix. Josh added the brownie mix at the end, and we didn't actually make brownies, we just ate the mixed batter throughout the day as we cooked. Yum.
[picture = Ben with our turkey from taobao! It was still frozen when it arrived.]


Everything else we tried to find at "biggest Sam's ever Sam's" our name for, well, the biggest San Mao Shopping Center that we've seen in Kaifeng. We got potatoes, what we thought were sweet potatoes, beans, canned corn, bread, green onions, crackers (for casserole), and other random ingredients.

Cooking began the day before, and I wasn't able to participate because I was planning for classes, but they made the pumpkin pie and the green bean hot dish. We had one little microwave-sized oven (that Ben purchased) and two hot plates with pots and pans to cook with. Thankfully, the turkey we got (an 8lb I believe) *just* fit into the mini-oven.
[Josh and Marlie cooking the day before.]


The next day (Thanksgiving Day!) we started as soon as I returned from new campus after classes. I almost did all the stuffing myself, while the others took care of the turkey and peeling, cleaning, and cutting potatoes. (About 7 pounds/20 or so potatoes.) We guessed on a LOT of things, like the amount of potatoes we needed, or in some cases, the amount of ingredients we needed in each dish, because we were lacking in a few things.

The stuffing I hoped would be good, because I was trying to counteract the bread that we used. The loaves of bread here seem to be a LOT sweeter (which is strange), and as far as I've seen, is almost exclusively white bread. So a lot of salt and onion and celery was needed. (plus chicken broth and garlic- that made up the stuffing)


My hands smelled like garlic and onion for about three days, even though I washed them quite a few times to try to get the smell off.

We knew the turkey would take a while to cook, at least three hours, so Josh went to get the turkey from Marlie's fridge. It was still a tiny bit frozen in the middle, so we stuck it in the shower... That's a sad looking turkey in there. And the stuffing got to cook quickly before the turkey went in.
The sad sad turkey...


Potatoes were next, and Ben and I helped mash them. We didn't have any containers large enough for all the potatoes, so Josh found a bucket of his, cleaned it out, and we mashed away...


When we came to the sweet potatoes, Ben noted they seemed a bit... wet. I thought they seemed a bit funny too, and I remembered that we were unsure that they really WERE sweet potatoes when we bought them, but they were the only things around that looked REMOTELY like sweet potatoes. I looked up the characters, and we'd actually gotten "snow lotus fruit". Definitely not sweet potatoes. But I remembered that I'd seen a vendor selling some outside west gate, and so Josh and I went to purchase some so we could still have some for dinner.

Almost everything was ready at this point, so we cleaned up, set the table, and I took a nap (because I was running on very little sleep) and came back upstairs to find everyone playing Scrabble.
Our delicious meal!


The dinner itself was Marlie, Josh, Ben, and I and we invited Jackie and Puppy (she couldn't come), Jeff, Emily, a female student (not mine, forgot her name), and a woman who came with Jackie to help film our Thanksgiving extravaganza.

All in all, the dinner was amazingly successful. The only hiccup being the sweet potatoes, and our inability to find whipped cream (or cream of ANY sort), and then at the end of the meal, testing out our homemade pumpkin pie... it was pretty terrible. Far too pumpkin-y, which I was thinking might happen since we had no nutmeg, and it was still a semi-radioactive orange color. But the TURKEY was delicious, and obviously the most important thing to get right, which we did. And the best part for me was finally finding REAL milk that wasn't yogurt, but drinkable milk. It tastes somewhere between 2% and 1%, but I will take what I can get.

My family doesn't have any real traditions for Thanksgiving, but Marlie read a poem and we went around the room saying what we were thankful for.

It was a great Thanksgiving, even if it wasn't with my real family.