As a
proud red, white, and blue-blooded American, last Thursday and Friday I shirked
my responsibilities and took off work to celebrate Thanksgiving. I spent all
day on Thursday cooking at a friend’s place, and we managed to pull together a
decent dinner. Everything went smoothly, except for all the things that didn’t.
Now, the
elaborate meal demanded by the holiday requires a great deal of preparation in
a place where the appropriate ingredients can be hard to come by. Our dear
host, Kate, and I began discussing the menu and guest list in early November.
Luckily, we had a friend coming in just before the big day, and she delivered
dried cranberries and cream cheese all the way from our cherished homeland. The
weekend before, we went to the bazaar and got the items that could be purchased
in advance. On Wednesday night, I would return from Qurghonteppa, and on
Thursday morning I would make an early trip to the bazaar and get all the
things that needed to be bought fresh. What an excellent plan!
Except
when my alarm went off at 7:00 on Thursday morning, I could hear rain hitting
the window. Who wants to go to the bazaar in the rain? Not me. So, I will
get another half hour of sleep, and then when I wake up it won’t be raining and
I’ll go. But it was still raining at 7:30. And then it was still raining at
8:00. And still, at 8:30. This is the point at which I realized that I can’t
actually control the weather by sleeping in thirty minute increments, and I got
out of bed.
So, I
started about an hour and a half later than I had originally intended, but that
was all right. No big deal. I stopped at Kate’s to catch up on any developments
that had occurred in my brief absence, then headed out to do the last of the
shopping. It was a pretty quick and painless excursion, even taking my
circuitous route through the stalls, which I have developed in order to avoid
the pepper man who always demands to know why I haven’t called.
With a
reusable shopping bag filled to capacity over my shoulder and an abnormally
large cabbage cradled in my arms, I made my way back to the kitchen around
11:00. I piled my plunder on the table, grabbed a cutting board and a knife,
and made the first cut into a pumpkin, when—darkness.
Now, ok,
I am exaggerating a little. Windows exist, so it was not a complete darkness,
you’re right, fine. It was actually still pretty bright. But the important bit
is that the power went out. And electric stoves need electricity to function.
That’s what I’m getting at here.
So, what
do I do? Do I swear out of frustration? Do I curse the memory of Benjamin
Franklin? No! No, of course not. I handle it very well. I stoically continue
cutting, peeling, and chopping while Kate calls her office to ask when the
power is expected to return, a half-baked cheesecake in the oven and a bowl of
cracked eggs on the counter. Under the assumption that the electricity will
return “in the early afternoon,” we soldier on and hope that “early afternoon”
means “exactly at 12:00 because that is when the turkey needs to go in.”
Not too
long after but not at noon, the power came back on, the cheesecake finished
baking, and the turkey swapped in around 1:30. It was a setback, but it also
gave us the opportunity to be the underdogs making a dramatic recovery. We
could do this. We could still be champions.
The
thing is—there was not really room for anything to be in the oven at the same
time as the turkey. The other thing is—I
am not great at estimating timing. As a matter of fact, I am pretty terrible at
it. So when people began turning up around 6:00 under the assumption that
dinner would be served at 7:00 or 7:30, I was just squeezing the stuffing that
wouldn’t fit in the bird on the rack above the turkey. And two separate
vegetable dishes had to go in after that. And also the turkey was still not
done.
And
that’s about when one of the people who had RSVPed as unable to attend texted
to wish me a happy Thanksgiving. I responded in kind and said that he and housemates
should stop by if they got a chance, thinking that they either wouldn’t come at
all or would turn up sometime after dinner. And he said, “Ok, we’re on our
way.” Oh boy. Kate’s not going to be happy about this.
I
confessed what I’d done, and she pardoned me (I think). The guests—both expected
and unexpected—had arrived. “Come on, let’s get them seated,” Kate told me.
“But the
food’s not done yet.”
“It’s
almost 9:00. We’ve got to get started.”
So I
went and shouted at some people because I am a lady, and they all came to the
table. There was just enough room for the sixteen of them, as long as Kate and
I stood weirdly by the sink and ate standing. And you know what? It all came
together. Not all at once, obviously, but in stages. There was a field of
roasted vegetables, salad, mashed potatoes, pumpkin sambusas, couscous,
cranberry sauce, stuffing, cornbread, and the main event—the turkey that Kate
had lovingly tended to/repeatedly molested over the course of the day. The
table was ravaged, and I found myself confronted with a carcass of dirty plates
and empty bowls. Crap.
I had
grudgingly started collecting the dishes and piling them in the sink when the
surprise guests came over. “We’re doing the dishes.”
“No, no,
it’s fine. I’ll do them.”
“No,
come on. We’ll do them.”
“No,
it’s ok.”
“Move.”
And
that, friends, is why you should always let whoever turns up at your door into
your home (or, in this case, your friend’s apartment).
After
the majority of the dishes were washed and stomachs were given time to digest,
we served dessert. People ate, hung out, and chatted. Over the course of the
night, I only hid from everyone twice. It was a lovely evening, and the last of
the guests left around 12:30. Except for me. I was tired.
“If you
let me sleep on your couch I’ll do the rest of the dishes tomorrow.”
“It’s a
deal.”
When I
finally woke up around 11:00, Kate was just about to head out for work.
“Here’s
the spare key. You won’t hate me for leaving you alone with the dishes?”
“No, of
course not! That was the plan.”
She
paused for a moment, surveying what having eighteen people over for dinner had
done to her apartment. And then, proudly, “I can’t believe we pulled it off.”
“Yeah,
it really turned out great!”
Kate
nodded with satisfaction and declared, “I’m never doing that again.”
Fair enough.
