Greetings from London: Thanksgiving

I had some trepidations about trying to pull off Thanksgiving in London. None of us are with our families, and we had decided to do a potluck traditional Thanksgiving for 11. Most everyone started making their contributions the night before, so as to not take up valuable kitchen space and time at the boys apartment on Thursday. Unfortunately, we all had class on Thursday, so we planned for the eating to begin at 7:30. I'm used to a more afternoon Thanksgiving, as was everyone else, but there was no choice.

To my surprise, the meal actually worked out. The food was all ready to go by 7: 30 and it was all really good. Eric and Andrew were in charge of the turkey- all 18 pounds of it - and I thought the moment when everything was going to fail was when Eric started to carve the turkey and found the giblets (whose absence had puzzled Andrew earlier in the afternoon when his arm was up to the elbow in raw turkey) in the neck, complete in their plastic bag. Neither of the boys had thought to stuff the neck as well as the bottom of the turkey, but it ended up being alright in the end.

We definitely had way too much food, but it was all so good. I had two helpings of entirely different food. We had the 18 lb turkey, gravy, french stuffing, traditional stuffing, cranberry chutney, cranberry relish, salad, macaroni and cheese, rolls, green bean cassarole, broccoli, company carrots, zucchini bread, stuffed mushrooms, roasted chestnuts, and twice baked potatoes. For dessert there were chocolate peanut butter cookies, fruit salad, peach cobbler, low-fat pumpkin pie, and traditional apple pie. Of course, we also had all the wine you could want, cider, and a traditional British drink of Pimm's and apple juice mixed together and heated up, which was really good- a little like mulled cider. All of the food was homemade and excellent. I haven't been that full in a long time. It took me a couple of hours to work up the energy to get on the bus to go home. All in all it was a great Thanksgiving and I'm really proud of all of us for pulling together to pull it off.