Thanks!

We had a very Shiso Thanksgiving about a week and a half ago. In the week leading up to that event, including actual Thanksgiving Thursday, I was totally not enthused. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, but I mostly failed to teach it to the kids (I thought they had done it a millions times... nope!) and then was buying important things like, oh, I dunno, green beans, midday on the actual day of the feast.

I was a lot more pumped last year, and more let down, too. This year felt a bit more like I was flying by the seat of my pants, and the whole thing went off great.

For reference, here are some photos from last year:


One of the most important being:

From 2009_11_28

This is what happens when 14 cook for 50 in a kitchen built for 8.

This year, our cooking team was about half of last year's, probably due to the paranoia of repeating last year's special brand of chaos. We also got into the cooking area at 9am instead of 1pm, which helped everyone's blood pressure a lot.

Last year, I invited a whole bunch of people, then didn't get to spend any time with any of them because by the time we were done bringing the food out, it was time for us to eat, then dessert, then it was time to clean up (and cleaning up took about six years, although we had to be out of the hall at 10pm). This time, we were able to clean as we went along, so wrap-up was a piece of cake. We actually had some time where we were just sitting around waiting for our food to finish cooking and our guests to come.

This time, I invited a lot less, and of them, only a few showed up. I ended up sitting with my JTE and his family and having a very pleasant time talking to them.

From 2010_11_27

We had games this time, too, which split up the feast time nicely.

Last year, I made pumpkin pie from a recipe I snagged at the Centro (one of the professor's there sent it to me upon request). It was amazingly delicious, but there were a ton of leftovers. Shiso enjoyed tupperwares full of my "pumpkin shit" for several days afterward.

Foolishly I assumed the same would be true of my sweet-potato souffle. Which I do believe I did as well as could be expected.. we didn't have mini marshmallows so I cut up some big ones. Yeah. Be thankful:



At the last minute (seriously, I didn't think we had the canned soup, so I nixed the idea of doing it until I got there and saw we had soup) I added green bean casserole, Campbell's regular recipe (mostly) to our menu.



So here's how that panned out:






Also, two people asked me for the sweet potato recipe, and one for the green bean recipe. I guess we'd call it a win. I still don't see how less people gave us less leftovers, but there you are.

I'm thankful for a whole boatload of things, and even though I spent all week missing my family and the US, I'm grateful too that Shiso Thanksgiving was such a good time for all.

Thanksgiving is an American holiday

Which makes it my job to educate the youth of Japan about it while missing it myself.

I’m not bummed, though. It’s sunny and looking like yesterday, which was warm for late November. And there’s nothing like trying to impress the meaning of Thanksgiving on kids who have never heard of it before, despairing of said task, then receiving a thank-you card right at the end of class.

Thanksgiving food game = the good side of “American food.” Apparently, according to another JET, it’s a Japanese tradition to get KFC on Thanksgiving evening because, ehh, it’s more or less the same thing, right?

I’m thankful for a lot of things. This is, I think, my favorite holiday!

Costco

Today, The Cat JET and I made a pre-Thanksgiving supply run to Costco in Osaka. Everything about this trip was epic in scope, from the anticipation of what we might find there, to the failures we encountered along the way, and of course the amount of food we purchased. Costco, as you know, doesn't sell things by the gram, ounce, or even pound. In metric-measuring Japan, a "shitload" is still a shitload. And that's how Costco measures, and now that's how my cupboard is stocked.

Half of my fridge is full of cheese. I am not exaggerating. (I have a pretty small fridge...)

We're planning a Thanksgiving meal, to which we can all invite our various Japanese friends who might be "hungry" for a little taste of American culture. We're attempting to make more or less traditional TKG fare, so we're renting a hall (yay, ovens!) and we've ordered some turkeys shipped in. My task this year will be pumpkin pie, and I'm going to use a recipe I got from our head professor (in Rome)'s wife. Lana is in charge of stuffing. Other various people are in charge of other various things. (I tried to nail down sweet potato souffle, but alas, some LA-ite had already dibsed "candied yams," whatever the heck those are.)

I'm really, really excited, because I feel like this is a really great gesture, and I'm dying for my main JTE to attend ("Mikan-sensei" I call him here), especially after all the kindness he's shown for me. Did I tell you about the time I forgot my lunch and he gave me half of his? I've seen the guy put away like three times my small-lunch size... so it was a pretty small lunch for him to begin with. By like 2pm, I was starving. I could only imagine how he felt, though. This, and other instances of fail make me feel like a total tool. So I'm excited to actually have something to give.

The Cat and I were also jazzed about the possibility of getting all kinds of food for ourselves and our own everyday lives. We daydreamed all the way to Osaka about what imported American goods we might find.

Costco was a strange world of wonder and a little disappointment. We filled a cart and a half, between TKG needs, requests from others, and our own desires. We did not find stuffing or canned pumpkin. We kind of missed out on our main targets, really.. they didn't have mac-n-cheese either, which felt strange.

But they did have peanut butter, and they did have jarred spaghetti sauce, and they did have refried beans. We even got one more turkey which is now in my freezer. My kitchen has never been so stocked in my adult life. I bought granola and bagels and cans of soup. I was sorely tempted by cookies and loaves of lemon poppyseed bread.. but they don't really use preservatives in this country, and I can't eat a (even a metric) shitload of cookies or bread before the 10th. Nor could The Cat eat an entire pumpkin pie. Sadly we put that back.

On the upside, now I know that if my pumpkin pie plans begin to fail early enough, I can make a mad dash to Costco, buy a pie or two, and be back in like 4 hours.

Our failures included getting lost, both on the ways in and out, and running entirely out of money. Like, I was overconfident in my ability to front the TKG fund (we are sorting receipts and getting paid back later, to even out the cost on everyone) because I had 'a bunch of hundos' in my wallet. A bunch of hundos does not security make. I made it home with about 372 yen or something. Classy.

But, if it were to snow up to the eaves tomorrow (not likely, since today reached all the way up to 71!), I for one would not starve, even if we stayed like that for a month or two.

The cheese is for The Other Georgian, by the way, who is making Real Mac And Cheese.

Yes!