Making Do Thanksgiving (Or, How To Cope With a Baking Holiday When You Don't Have an Oven)

Thanksgiving this year just wasn't the same. I don't really mean that in a bad way. Given the option I probably would've chosen to be home for this holiday, but my friends here and I scraped together a pretty fine substitute that I wouldn't trade for anything now. Sure, it was hard, and took three days, and didn't turn out perfect, but it turned out pretty good enough and after I ate I got that too full feeling that is indicative of yummy Thanksgiving.

This endeavor began because our new American friend Sara has the same enthusiasm for Thanksgiving as I do. When we met on November 5th it was one of the first things we brought up and decided, then and there, to do it. Since, Sara and her friend Keri had to leave Kathmandu before the actual day, we had it 6 days early. The preparations began on Wednesday. Sara, Mer, and I went to Bhat Battini Supermarket - a 5 floor monstrosity of food and clothing and other goods that would only be common place in the States. There we found a frozen $80 turkey that was too puny and too expensive for our tastes. However, this was a triumph for me because no one would believe there were any turkeys in Nepal. We gathered all the big supermarket items that we wouldn't be able to find in the local Nepali stores (things like confectioners sugar, whip cream mix, peanut butter) and had two cups each of this weird perfect corn stuff.

On Thursday we started gathering more ingredients near our houses. Sara lives in Patan and has a great open air market near her. Here's James (Sara's roommate), Kumar (Sara's boyfriend), Mer, and Sara walking to this market all Reservoir Dogs Style:



At the market, Mer busted out one of her many thousands of lists. I wish I had gotten a picture of all the lists together, but basically there were about ten lists all of which had the same ingredients on it, just in different orders. Here's Kumar, Sara, and Mer (with a list) at the market:



Then we headed to Sara, Keri, and James' apartment to cook the baked items. We had convinced a bakery called Fiji to bake some of our food items at around 7pm that evening. We made a pumpkin pie with fresh cinnamon, here's James grinding it in a bowl with the bottom of a wine bottle:



Sara instructed us all on her specialty: the no-bake peanut butter squares. Here's Mer doing her special double-boil-thing to heat up the chocolate and peanut butter:



Keri doesn't cook, so she hung around and kept us company:



At night we rushed over to Fiji Bakery to bake our pumpkin pie and stuffing. There was only one available oven and it didn't even go high enough to rightly cook the pumpkin pie. We knew we were going to be there for a while. Here's the owner (who studied cooking/baking in Japan), one of his daughters, a bakery employee, Mer and blurry Sara:



While we waited, we played with the owners kids doing boring things like shooting rubberbands and making funny faces. Here's Sara being less boring and tossing them around, they LOVED it:



After two hours of waiting and the pumpkin pie refusing to be finished, we went home with the promise to come pick things up in the morning. The next day we all went our separate ways: Sara picking things up around town, Mer cooking, me picking up things around town, James cooking at his apartment. Shusila came over early to help us finish up the cooking and make some saag:



Shusila brought her nephew Netus with her, and Kumar and I started playing cards with him. I taught them how to play Spoons and they taught me a Nepali card game. Here's them playing:



Sara made some excellent home-made apple cider in a coca cola bottle. She would heat it up and you could mix rum in it. Shit, it was good:



And here's the final spread (there's salad in that red bucket)



For my own reference, here's who came:

1, 2 Lauren/Mer (USA)
3 Sara (USA)
4 Kumar (Nepal)
5 James (USA)
6 Keri (USA)
7 Bhakta (Nepal)
8 Pia (Finland)
9 Naba (Nepal)
10 Albert (USA)
11 Rich (UK)
12 Arielle (USA)
13 - 17 Shajjan + 4 (Nepal)
18 Saroj (Nepal)
19 Shusila (Nepal)
20 Netus (Nepal)
21, 22 Min + 1 (Nepal)
23 Komako (Japan)
24 Mike (USA)
25 Danielle (USA)
26 Miriam (Austrailia)
27 - 30 Landlord and Co. + 4 (Nepal)