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. :)