Thanksgiving

Our third year in China, and you would think we would have Thanksgiving down. The main problem is that most of the ingredients in a Thanksgiving are native to the States, not China. We planned ahead by bringing over some ingredients and hiding them in our cupboard all year. It is really hard, brown gravy sound really appetizing about July when you have not had any since Feb. This years feast started with a conversation with my students on Tuesday about where could I buy a fresh bird. I knew that if I wanted a turkey I could pony up and go to the Metro and pay a lot of RMB for a 2cd rate imported bird. I see they raise ducks and chicken all over, I wanted to find a fresh one. When you go to the Chinese restaurants the ducks are amazing. I wanted to get one like that. The chickens we buy seem to be tough old birds. My students said that tough old birds are good for you and somehow it will make you live a long life to eat them, so that's why they are sold like that. The restaurants get their birds from special duck farms. They thought there might be a market near where I bought yarn that possibly I could get a good duck, but they weren't sure if I could get a raw one. Meanwhile one student was busy playing with her phone. I thought she was using her translator to follow the conversation or else was just rude and texting in class. I teach adults, and many of them are very very important in the university so sometimes they have real business that goes on their phones during class. Anyway, they are all adults so I figure that I don't need to babysit them and tell them not to use their phones. So we continue to talk about the food safety issues surrounding butchers and poultry dealers and the phone student sets down the phone and says, "My husband is bring a goose". I, of course, offered to buy it. No, no, no. Since I don't give grades in the class, it isn't a bribe, it is a genuine gift. It still felt really awkward.
Her husband's friend is a bird dealer, wild and raised, and lives in the country. Did I want the bird live? I asked for no feathers.
This student is also in my husbands class. Some people really want to improve their English so they come to mutiple classes a week. The die hard one we call "English junkies", they can't stand to miss any classes. She is more like a "fair weather fan", if she has time she comes to every class in a week and then there will be weeks that we don't see her. So on Wed. she delivered a large frozen goose to Chris's class. I was so relieved that she did it in his class because I wasn't sure how I would receive the bird properly or what do you do with a big frozen bird while you teach for 2 hours. Plus, how would the other students react to her giving us the goose.
Anyway, the bird was big and frozen at 4pm and because we had to teach all afternoon on Thanksgiving, we planned to eat at noon. Teenager has class 'til 12 and I begin teaching at 2-6 and Chris has the night shift at 6:30pm. So noon was the only time we had for the feast.
Everything in our kitchen is the size of the dwarf's in Snow White. We have a little bitty sink with a little fridge and an oven about the size bigger than a toaster oven. Counter space does not exist. The ayi uses the cutting board over the sink to work on when she cooks.
We chose to thaw the bird in the crock pot. The problem is that the crock pot is near where the cat usually eats.

One plug for the whole kitchen limits your cooking range

It has never been a problem before because the crock pot has a lid on it, as does the rice cooker. You load up your pot on the stove and then plop it down into the appliance on the floor. It as as clean as you can get in China. We talked of moving the operation to various rooms but decided it was best to just provide supervision of the cat outside of the kitchen. The cat has to go thru the kitchen to the balcony to take care of her business so we didn't want to have issues with that either.
So we put the bird in the crock pot and went to sleep. At 1am we woke to the delicious smell goose. Half the bird was done. I mean really done. The other half was thawed. We decided to put it in the fridge and go back to sleep.
In the morning we found we had cooked off the wings, but the bonus was that now it was the size that could fit into the oven.

The goose

The second big problem was the pumpkin pie. We had carefully researched how to make a pumpkin pie from scratch online. The plan executed perfectly and we had wonderful pumpkin goup that looked just like the stuff in the can. Then the recipe called for the crust. The problem was that a crust uses lots of butter. Butter is expensive here, about 22RMB a stick. 4 sticks for a pie!!! So we raided our cabinet and found a gingerbread kit we brought from the States, just add water! It actually was delicious and now will forever replace the crust of a pumpkin pie in our house.
For our Thanksgiving feast, we also had deviled eggs (only tricky ingredient in China is yellow mustard), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes (no normal mini marshmallows, but the white with rainbow centers browned nicely), cranberries (from the States), brown gravy (mix from the States, green bean casserole (tasted quite Asian because the mushroom soup here is different), jello (from the States), beer biscuits (beer is more reliable than Chinese yeast), the goose stuffed with oranges and mushrooms (no stuffing, and we were too late realizing we needed to make croutons or find puffed millet (maybe available), we could have used rice, but we are kind of sick of rice), and pumpkin pie. We invited the other American teacher and he brought cherry tomatoes and Chinese pastries. This year we invited our two biggest "English junkies" because they have come to sooo mannny classes that we couldn't help but become their friends and we thought if you like English that much, you might as well see a "real" American Thanksgiving. And Little Guy decided to be "that whiny kid" that always is at a family get together and he cried for the first 5 minutes of the feast. His sister had is favorite plate and then a guest had his favorite fork and on top of that was sitting on the stool that he usually plays with. But everyone just talked over his fit and he was happy when he got the biscuits and his sister traded plates with him. It felt like a very normal Thanksgiving meal, so maybe China has become our new normal.
But I was really Thankful that this will be the last Thanksgiving in China for at least a few years!

pumpkin pie, from a real pumpkin

I wanted to take more pictures, but so much was going on that I forgot.

Harbin, China