Thanksgiving

Anyone who's ever been away from home on a major holiday knows that it can be a rough time. Especially a holiday like Thanksgiving, where so much of the fun of the holiday revolves around tradition. It's impossible to duplicate the relationships that make togetherness on a holiday important, and depending on where you are, even carrying out the rituals that surround the holiday can be difficult. For example, the phone calls home this year left my mouth watering with an insatiable desire for turkey. All of this leaves you with a choice: either you try and have a real Thanksgiving, big dinner and all, or you discard tradition and make the holiday special by doing something out of the ordinary. In the past, the latter has always worked out better for me than the former, but this year has broken my streak.

In a moment of optimism and extreme ambition a few weeks ago, Kate, Carolyn and I decided that we should invite the people to whom were indebted for making our lives in Ulan-Ude much easier over for a real Thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately, when we started making a guest list, the numbers quickly hit unrealistic levels - we are very indebted. After some hard choices, we came up with a guest list of 18 people that matched our dish and seating capacities, planned out a menu, set a time and date, and got ready for a party.

That part was easy enough. The five hours of frantic cooking and ingredient-substituting that proceeded the arrival of all of our guests was the really hard part. Here's a few of the challenges that we faced.

• There is no turkey to be had in Ulan-Ude. Actually, there is one, it's just in the zoo. Seriously.
• Sage, rosemary, and thyme are equally absent. Good thing for Simon and Garfunkel that parsley is popular.
• No measuring cups or spoons. We picked a teacup and designated it the standard, and eyed everything according to it.
• The average Russian stove is about 1/3 the size of an American stove, and one of the racks from ours was missing, so it only had one shelf. In retrospect, maybe it's a good thing that we didn't find a turkey, because juggling two pies and the stuffing was hard enough.
• The average Russian kitchen, while plentiful in stock and soup pots, is sadly lacking in casserole dishes. The result: a stock pot full of cabbage braised on the bottom and barely steamed on top.
• The average Russian apartment has no interior ventilation system, relying instead on small windows. The kitchen was about 85 degrees by the time we were done. It smelled really good, though.
• Green pumpkin. Yes. The pumpkin's shell was green, which turns the part of the inside that's close to the rind a rather funny and unappetizing color.

But it all came together. Despite the fact that we ate two hours later than we had planned (but isn't that in the grand tradition of some Thanksgivings, anyway?), dinner was wonderful, and I have to say we did a damn good job. We had pumpkin soup, mushroom gravy, mashed potatoes, braised/steamed/raw cabbage, cranberry sauce, potato chips with sour cream and onion dip, stuffing, chicken (OK, we cheated and bought it from a take-out place, but how much can you really ask?), and pumpkin and apple pies with home-made pie crust. All for 16 people, who all had an excellent time. Which is good, because it made the 1 1/2 hours spent doing dishes due to the lack of a dishwasher worthwhile.