Canadian Thanksgiving!

This weekend I hosted my first Thanksgiving dinner without real adults around (aka, I have to be the real adults now which is not as scary as it used to be).

The moment I saw my friend Kyla's incredible flat I said we needed to host a dinner party and make use of her fantastic kitchen and so we planned to make a Thanksgiving dinner for all of us Canadians living abroad.

There were a number of obstacles in this endeavor, one being that we are living in Asia where it is either incredibly hard to find certain Western foods, or incredibly expensive when you do. These were small matters for us intrepid Canadians.

One guy living here who did his university degree in Canada actually contacted the Canadian Singapore Association, which I frankly had no idea even existed to ask where we could find a turkey. Kyla and I wandered around Singapore going into every Cold Storage and calling the ones we weren't close to trying to locate a turkey. I think we had the same conversation about 10 times:

"Hi, do you carry turkey?"
"Wha?"
"You know turkey. Gobble gobble? *arm flapping*"
"Ah! Turkey ah? No."

However, finally we found one. She was only 12lbs which then scared us because our modest guest list quickly became about 30 people and we began to worry that there wouldn't be enough turkey to go around. This didn't stop us from taking the turkey once we bought it with us to Boat Quay to chill at the Prince of Wales for a little bit. We thought we'd show her around before her inevitable demise.

And so we decided to compensate with making a lot of side dishes in the hopes that that would make sure that there was enough food to go around. We started Friday night, with my preparing my Dad's ceaser salad recipe (which I may say turned out perfectly) and Kyla preparing some life changingly good butter tarts.

Kam, a pilot from Toronto, brought over three boxes of stuffing that he had bought when he was back home earlier in the month and we realized we only needed to cook the turkey for about 4 hours. We were expecting it to be an ordeal.

The next day we got up and finished defrosting the turkey in poor Matt's bathtub, which he arrived home to after two weeks in Australia and the 8 hour flight from hell to find me in the bathroom of his bedroom trying to find a way to tie the turkey onto the handle in the bathtub so that it wouldn't be submerged. Poor guy.

The rest of the day (aside from a break to go to zumba while the turkey was in the oven) was spent preparing stuffing, potatoes, veggies (I didn't touch them) lettuce for the salad, gravy, apple crisp, maccaroni salad, and all manner of delicious Canadian ish foods.

When everyone arrived it was a great night with everyone saying how good the food was, me being proud we didn't poison anyone and also manage to feed two vegetarians, one with a gluten allergy and all getting to meet new people. With a professional magician that Kyla knows thrown in for good measure.

All in all, I am very proud of our dinner and I am looking so forward to moving into a new flat in November that has a kitchen that I will actually be able to use so that I can start making food for myself like my own salads and butter tarts, haha!