Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Thanksgiving

Another Thanksgiving, another long time between posts, another really long post with all sorts of information that you guys will have to skip over to get to the good parts.

It's kind of fun to remember blogging on Thanksgiving last year. It's fun to remember back to what I was doing at this time last year. And having blogged about it, means that I remember all about it when I'm blogging this year. Fun!

So - this Thanksgiving was pretty good. I'm in Victoria this year. We flew to Vancouver on Saturday morning. The flight was normal. We arrived a little early actually and our bags were in the first 10 off the plane -- so maybe not that normal. Then we took the ferry to Victoria, arriving around 5:30pm. We celebrated Rob's birthday that night. On Sunday we all went to church and then for dim sum. Sunday was Rob's dad's 70th birthday and so we had a sort of tea ceremony. I don't know much aobut it, really, just that we served Rob's dad tea (and his mum too since her 70th is in April but we won't be here), received lycee, and received "advice". The eldest went first and the youngest last. It was fine - but I'm not really a big fan of many of these Chinese traditions. Maybe I don't understand them well enough. I made Rob's dad a Tiramisu for his birthday cake. (I didn't do a very good job this time. I've made it before, quite successfully, but something went wrong this time. Sadly, I'm still not even sure where I went wrong so I'm going to have to try again. I think it was a combination of having my ingredients at the wrong temperature and over soaking the sponge. )

On Monday we celebrated Thanksgiving. It was my chance to do some cooking. This year the menu was:
  • Creamy Mushroom Soup
  • Endive and Butter Lettuce Salad, with pumpkin seeds, olives, orange segments, and an orange dressing
  • Roast Turkey
  • Stuffing, baked and served in yellow peppers
  • Sweet Potatoes (sliced and roasted with olive oil and parmesan)
  • Cornbread
  • Brussel Sprouts
  • Snap Peas in garlic sauce
  • Gingersnap Crust Pumpkin Pie
Everybody really enjoyed it. Rob's family is polite enough not to say anything, even if they didn't like it that much. The pumpkin pie was unbelievably good. And the potatoes, sprouts and soup were also quite good. The rest of it needed some work. The turkey was tasty, just not quite as good as last year. The stuffing I made last year was much better and the garlic sauce on the peas was too oily. The olives in the salad weren't quite right and the oil I used in the dressing was too strongly flavoured for the rest of the salad. The corn bread was really yucky IMO but Rob and Cynthia liked it. Hmm .. I'll have to keep working on it.

Since then, there's just been a lot of hanging around, knitting, reading (Baggage by Emily Barr) and eating of leftovers. Not such a bad vacation!

Talk to you soon,

B.

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