Thanksgiving in the P.R.C.

  Kaifeng, China
Saturday, December 1, 2007

"What if we make our own oven?"
"Can't you make them out of cardboard and aluminum foil?"
"Yeah, except you need aluminum foil and the sun - two things China doesn't have."
"Ok, but what about bricks? What if we make our own brick oven? China has lots of bricks."
"But would that work for a pie? Also, wouldn't we need stuff like...mortar?"
 
    So naturally, Ben and I investigated how to build ovens on the Internet. Thanksgiving in China had begun. 
 
    Opting to forgo our original plan (dinner at KFC) we decided that we were going to brave the communal kitchen in the International Affairs building and make a fake Thanksgiving.  The goal: apple pies, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes, vegetable soup, stuffing, chicken from the night market and curry.  Our supplies: no measuring cups, no real knives, one stove with only one setting - very very hot, and a toaster oven we weren't quite sure worked. 
 
    So the six of us bombarded the Tank Tops' kitchen and started to make the food on a whole lot of hope.

mashed...potatoes.

At one point, as I kept forgetting to take the green bean casserole out of the toaster oven, the mashed potatoes were tasting like singed wetness, and we were operating with one knife, we were all a little skeptical about whether or not we could actually do Thanksgiving.  But once I pulled the first apple pie (success!)

great success!

out of the toaster oven and Jess and Alex worked some magic on the potato recon mission, we started to realize that fake Thanksgiving might actually turn into a real Thanksgiving.
 
"Oh my God," said Max as we walked into the kitchen.  "It smells like America in here."
 
    So our Thanksgiving turned out surprisingly well.  Jess was there which made me happy and Sally White came as well, much to everyone's surprise and great anticipation.  Vichara, an American woman who has been teaching in Kaifeng for the past month, also came and best of all was Bingde, Ben's Korean roommate, who celebrated his very first Thanksgiving.  It was a strange but good mix of people and it was a really comforting feeling to sit in Max's apartment with a warm plate of somewhat normal food on my lap listening to Sally and Vichara tell us their insanely interesting life stories.
 
    The success of the Thanksgiving food was so great that it inspired me to try and make Christmas cookies.  That venture however, failed miserably.

broken spoon!

Turns out that some ingredients (like baking soda, baking powder, and vanilla) are actually essential to the success of cookie making.  Crazy, who would have thought?