Thanksgiving at Home... Away from Home

Blogging location: Flat, 3:14am

Being proud of my American identity, I wasn't going to let Thanksgiving sneak by without acknowledgment. Quite the opposite. I was going to impose it upon the unsuspecting country in which I now live in... Luckily, my flat mates were more than happy to accept this new form of imperialism-- then again, who wouldn't? Eating and cooking all day?

So last month, I made a list of all things Thanksgiving while chatting about Americanisms with my flat mates. This list included turkey, cranberry sauce, gravy, mash(ed potatoes), green beans... the typical English Christmas dinner, really... but wait! Candied yams??? What are candied yams? WHAT ARE YAMS? Something had to be done.

Like the good procrastinator I am, I waited till the day before to actually shop for my designated assignments: candied yams and pumpkin pie. I seemed to have chosen the most difficult-- no, IMPOSSIBLE-- task. It wasn't a good sign when my flat mates said that they'd never seen pumpkin pie sold here and I probably couldn't get canned pumpkin in England. That's like calling Marty McFly "chicken". Determined to not be defeated, I set out on the search for canned pumpkin. Which reduced to a search for pumpkin-ANYTHING. I even got to a point where I looked for pumpkin soup and mashed pumpkin in the BABY FOOD aisle. I think I've officially become "crazy-pumpkin-girl" in West Yorkshire since I've asked so many supermarket employees whether they carried pumpkin in a tin. I literally spent an entire day-- with a break consisting of one lecture in between.

Rejection after rejection after rejection, I dragged my feet up and down the streets of Leeds, looking for any international food stores, considering settling on making a cheesecake or even... wait for it... STORE BOUGHT APPLE PIE (and not the Marie Calendars kind either! Tragedy!) The rain was relentless and the wind had picked up to a point where you had to nearly double over to walk.

Anyways, I'll cut to the chase: after buying some yams at the open market, I made a last ditch effort for pumpkin-anything at Sainsbury's. And there I found solace in awkward pear-shaped form... no, not the middle-aged manager at Sainsbury's... Butternut squash! The peachy-coloured cousin of the pumpkin. You have no idea how much I doubted it would be a formidable substitute, but they smell exactly the same and look the same on the inside, surprisingly. I might say butternut squash is a bit creamier, but I had a smaller portion of cream cheese anyways. Thanks to the amazing Paula Deen, I had myself a pumpkin pie recipe, but I stealthily swapped canned pumpkin for freshly made squash puree. The night before I prepared the squash/pumpkin puree and today it all came together! Yes, I would do it again because look how it turned out!:





Onwards!
For a while I thought Thanksgiving was going to consist of just the yams, pie and maybe mash, which is a bit sadder than my original plan, but I was prepared for the worst. Sometime around 2:00 in the afternoon, one of my flat mates rolls into the flat with a Turkey! Prospects are brightened. That goes in the oven around 3:30. Later, one of my flat mates comes in with the largest sack of potatoes I've ever seen and carries it into the flat the way the seven dwarves hi-ho'd their mining equipment up the mountain and two of them made two pots of mashed potatoes or "mash" while another dashed out to buy green beans, cranberry sauce, more pie supplies for the crusts, etc! In a flurry, I rang mum up for her candied yams recipe and Thanksgiving was in full throttle by 4:00!

Production:


^Pie filling











All in all, Thanksgiving actually proved to be more successful than I thought... and here's why:
1. Thanksgiving happened. My flat mates came together at the last minute and went out to haul back copious amounts of food. The turkey didn't actually roll in till about 2:00pm. o.o Imagine how nerve-wrecked I was.
2. We had everything (that I would eat for turkey day-- I purposefully left stuffing off the list because it's just one of those foods that looks rough)
3. My flat mates LOVED the candied yams, even though they had their doubts and/or never heard of yams before.
4. I was able to keep my sanity via butternut squash. And my flat mates really liked the pie. :)

To top off the night, I webcammed with my family while they made dinner, hung out with my dog a bit, watched some Youtube videos with my little brother and "sat" at the table with them for Thanksgiving grace. Doesn't beat actually being at home, but it was damn well close to it. :)

Grand Announcement

Hi friends!
This sounds very trivial to be published on its own, but I've achieved one of my goals: Bringing California to the UK... AKA getting my flat mates to say "Dude." Now I just need to make it a habit of theirs.
Wish me luck!

-Raechel

P.S. Also brought CA to Leeds within the first three weeks: the weather was stunningly nice... it only rained two days! Score! But alas, the inevitable has stricken: the chance of rain is now 50% every day. I've gone thru two umbrellas (guys here, and I mean guys my age, apparently don't use umbrellas because they think it makes them look like sissies...). Cheerio!

A Bit of Traveling... Manchester, Liverpool, & Dublin

Blogging location: the good ol' flat; it's sunny outside! AMAZING.

.:NHS:.
Before I get to the traveling part, I would like to announce that I've gotten my flu shot. Momentous, I know. But the difference between getting a flu shot here and getting one in the States, thanks to the National Health Service, is the paying for the thing. As far as I know, I just walked in, checked in and got my flu shot. It's weird not having to pull out the insurance card or the wallet. I really don't have any further comments because I'm not one for politics. Oh and I also qualified mystically to get the swine flu shot... A flat mate of mine can brag about surviving the swine flu, so I guess I can always live vicariously through him.

.:Traveling:.
Now, for traveling! A few weekends ago (boy, has time flown!) myself and more study abroad students from the EAP traveled via coach to Manchester on a Friday and Liverpool the following Saturday for kicks and giggles. And because I've always wanted to see those areas since 1) Manchester was originally my first choice for study abroad (but it was replaced by Leeds when I read up on Leeds' Communication dept) and 2) one word: BEATLES.

To prep for the trips, I maniacally utilized Google to it's full extent, searching for Top 10 Tourist attractions lists and then Google mapping places... I'm questioning whether I'm more neurotic than I think I am...

.:Manchester:.
Had to get up before the sun did to catch the coach! But considering that the sun doesn't really rise till like 8:00, this doesn't say much... Here's a video to summarize the trip!:




.:Liverpool:.
Ah, yes, Liverpool, home of the Scoucers and the Beatles! :) Yet another really early departure; unfortunately my battery in my camera was dying, so there's a lack of photos in this slideshow video, but hopefully, you get the idea. We visited some museums, both art and natural history museums and then hit the town for lunch (I had steak and ale pie for the first time!) and to look for Beatles landmarks, which we found! We hit the Cavern, where the Beatles played their first gigs (the original Cavern was torn down to construct the underground and the bricks were auctioned off-- but they rebuilt it anyways.) Next we sought out the Liverpool Cathedral, the biggest cathedral in the UK. Photos and videos cannot show how MASSIVE the building was. Though it wasn't very old, it still retained the style of an older cathedral. Next we went hunting for a Tesco's (basically one of cheapest supermarket chains in the UK) to buy munchies. To tie up the day, we went back to Mathews St. to the clubs and pubs and hit a couple of those places to peer about. Though their nightlife is not at all comparable to Leeds (this comparison is both good and bad), we still had a fab time and even caught a decent cover band playing in the Cavern. Here's all of that in audio visual format!:


.:Dublin, Ireland:.
Our decision to go to Dublin was partially based on Halloween having come from Ireland. While we were there, we hit loads of the tourist sites. I thought the city was pretty cool... till I was told it was the most expensive country in Europe. Boy, were they right... Dublin uses the Euro, but that aside, the prices for everything were nuts. For food we settled with buying cheap groceries at Tesco's. I personally went with 1 euro's worth of french bread and a hunk of brie cheese for a day, but I enjoyed every bit of it. :)
While Dublin was a cool place to see, there were probably more gift shops than there were actual attractions of interest, which is why I'm glad we went on the particular weekend we did. There were special events going on such as the Dublin Chocolate Festival and there were just tons of people around for Halloween weekend. Our trip also included a visit to the Guinness Storehouse. I admit that I don't actually care for Guinness and I would never use my own money to buy myself a pint, but it was just awesome to see the storehouse. Very impressive. And yes, it does taste noticeably different from the Guinness in Leeds (or anywhere else, I suppose).
Being in Dublin for the weekend, I decided to visit a church for Sunday service. I ended up going to Christ Church Cathedral, an Anglican church. It was a pretty traditional sung eucharist service, and the choir was more than amazing, not to mention the acoustics. Just being in there for the experience was truly awesome. Again, here's a video, because my writing isn't nearly good enough to be able to share my trip in just words:



.:Leeds:.
I don't have to travel far to get to Leeds, so I figured I'd go see a play my friend was in. :) The play was Grimm Tales and it was a fab production; the performances and the storytelling were very good and it was just a great time sitting on the stage (this play stresses a lack of a proscenium arch, breaking the bounds between audience and actors and basically, the actors are pretending to be wild crazies, so you can imagine the personal space boundaries they're breaking, haha). It really did make me want to do theatre (ha, look how I spelt 'theater').

As always, I'm taking questions from anyone about living in Leeds/England or suggestions of things to check out. Till next time...
<3 Raechel