Thursday, November 26, 2009

Successful Thanksgiving!

As you know from your diligent reading of this blog, we never know what we'll end up with here. It was therefore with much trepidation that I ordered a turkey and invited seven people over for dinner. My back up plan if the turkey was a disaster? Sending the driver out for multiple rotisserie chickens. Thankfully, we didn't have to resort to such drastic measures!

A few weeks ago, the import grocery store had a sign up to order turkeys for the holidays. Somehow time got away from me (that pesky baby!) and I didn't manage to get myself there until the Friday before Thanksgiving. The meat counter guy said he'd call me on Monday when our turkey came in. Monday came and went with no phone call ... so Tuesday evening I went to the store. The guy looked confused, but after some running around, eventually pulled out a 6.5kg (14 lbs) bird from a deep freezer. I still think I may have taken home someone else's bird!

Turkey in hand, I thought I was home-free. Wednesday, I set out to bake four pies - a simple procedure for someone accustomed to baking at least nine! Unfortunately, after being on for four hours, my little "Barbie" oven (as a coworker affectionately calls it, since it's only slightly larger than a toy oven she played with as a kid) started making funny noises. The pies were finished, but the first batch of yeast rolls failed.

Thankfully, my neighbor (coworker) was not using his oven for Thanksgiving, so Thursday morning we sent the turkey over there, with my mom running over to his apartment every 15 minutes or so to baste. His Barbie oven worked wonderfully, though the temperature was so uneven, the turkey was done an hour faster than expected!

Friends showed up, dishes were warmed (my oven could handle that task), and a delicious dinner was had. Except for the minor oven drawback, everything went very smoothly - quite unbelievable, actually! It was almost like we weren't even in India (until we were very thankful for Sarwary and Shabana staying late to help with the dishes!).

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