Chris and I cooked our own Thanksgiving Dinner yesterday. Obviously the Japanese do not celebrate Thanksgiving (although they do have a national holiday on Nov 23rd called Labour Thanksgiving, but it's not a big deal) so we both had to work on the actual holiday.
Dinner posed a bit of a quandary for us, as we are pretty limited in cooking equipment/resources. The Japanese don't really eat turkey (never seen it once, in 8 months) so that was out of the question. Not that we had an oven to cook one in anyway. We wanted to find something at least a little special to base the dinner around, so Chris cooked up some pepper steaks. I took a step into the unknown and made Beer Cheese Soup for the first time, and cobbled together something that was based in part on an online recipe, as well as what was available in the store. It ended up being pretty tasty, but you wouldn't want a very big helping ;) Good for roll dipping, though. I love yams, so we got the closest thing to them: Imo . I mashed them with some butter and milk, then sprinkled brown sugar over the top - delicious!
We found some kind of odd little cake for dessert, and I also made some no-bake chocolate peanut butter corn flake treats.
All in all, a pretty good mini-feast. We missed our family and friends, but we managed to create some of the normal holiday spirit, and ended the evening by watching Miracle on 34th Street - the movie does start on Thanksgiving, so technically it was all within November traditions. Plus, if you know me you know I start getting pumped for Christmas pretty early, so I was dying to see a holiday classic.
Check out the pics from our little dinner:
