A Central Asian Thanksgiving

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.