Canadian Thanksgiving

Yup, it’s a turkey, pumpkin pie, stuffing, veggies and more! Unbeknownst to AoY Canada celebrates Turkey Day with the best of them. It’s just a month early. But I say it’s never the wrong time for turkey so I grabbed flatmate and we trucked over to Tower Hill to spread goodwill and deliver pie. Our hosts were both Canadian, one of which is in my program, and the invitees were like a couples advertisement for the holidays. There was a Norwegian, a South American Irish, a few Brits, another Irish guy, and a couple of Americans to complete our little U.N. of feasting. One of the more interesting dishes was parsnips done up like sweet potato fries. They were very tasty and I finally had a comparison to offer non-Southerners to yams! One girl was allergic to dairy (my greatest nightmare) so the Gospel Bird had to be rubbed with oil instead; it made the inside a tad drier but no ill effects were suffered. An enormous complement of vegetable dishes including turnips, potatoes, carrots, and others accompanied stuffing from a box (just add water!) which surprisingly tasted like stuffing rather than cardboard.

A few events leading up to dinner precipitated my bringing a store-bought dessert rather than making something from scratch. First, T’s laptop was stolen from her library. I would say I was shocked that such theft occurs at academic institutions but people at my pseudo-Ivy stole everything that wasn’t bolted down and even that wasn’t always a deterrent. I hadn’t planned on putting criminology studies to use so quickly but I was more than ready to tackle any suspicious characters on my way into the library. The security guys were slightly less helpful than doorknobs. They had security videos, yes, but they weren’t focused on the study carrels. Fine, okay, but what about the hallway? As the gentleman explained that the thief could possibly have brought a bag and placed the pilfered goods inside, T and I both thought there might be a chance that the guy (or girl, can’t be sexist here) could have cased the joint, swooped in and walked down the hall a bit before placing his new property inside. Our suggestion that on the off chance there might be video footage of such an event met with stern resistance. “We can’t just go through people’s bags and accuse them because it might be your laptop!” Great, now the anal retentive side of the Brits come out. Another thought that maybe search the cameras a bit before and after the estimated time of the robbery t see if someone was lurking around the area met with similar rebukes. Sherlock Holmes would be humiliated by his countrymen.

After leaving T to fill out a “Loser Report” which made us both smile a bit, it was off to Tesco to buy a ready-to-bake pie crust and filling for cherry pie with ice cream and sauce. The first monkey wrench was the ongoing problem of no Internet, hence no recipe. Okay, no big deal-how hard can it be to throw pre-made filling into a pie shell after baking it and bake it some more? I felt confident enough in my culinary prowess to survive without “Charleston Receipts” but find another slight hiccup in the discovery that BRITS REALLY SUCK IN THE GROCERY ARENA OF LIFE. No pre-made Pet Ritz crusts that are ready to pop into the oven at 325 for 15 minutes but rather some pastry dough that you have to mumble incantations over for 12 hours and cut with butter and roll out and stretch and refrigerate overnight. There were some stale shortbread options but at this point I had three hours and a limited amount of patience. My desperation and dismay must have transmitted to a woman nearby because it’s like my mother popped over from SC and started advising me on my different options in the face of adversity. I had a tin of ‘custard mix-just add water’ and pie filling as one option, a refrigerated backed good as another, fresh fruit to curry, frozen pies-the lady just took it into her mind to navigate me through the waters of British cuisine as it were. I thanked her but as my basket started getting weighed down further and further by things minced and pre-packaged I felt myself getting panicked at the thought of putting something (like flaky banloffi pie with clotted double cream) back on the shelf in the hopes of saving everyone arteries. One apple tart and lemon meringue pie later I hustled back to grab flatmate and run for the tube.

Dinner was great fun and the conversation was diverse a there were about four social groups colliding over poultry and pastry. A few of the non-single men had attended LSE the year before and had good tips on how to navigate the British education system (I’ve decided that guns blazing and wide open is the best method of action), job hunting ideas and ways to get around bureaucracy (really, they mean socialism but I’ll let that slide). Differing ideas of what constitutes Thanksgiving provided endless amusement for the Europeans and T and my’s “Night ya’ll” as we headed home elicited a quick chuckle from the entire party.

The only bad part of the evening, aside from T’s laptop, was a case of either food poisoning or tea poisoning for yours truly. In a bid to stave off holiday lbs and boost energy I headed to the local health store on High Street Kens and purchased “Slimatee-For an energy and metabolism boost as part of a healthy regime” along with more vitamins (I now mentally pronounce them as “VITT-A-MINNS”-ewwww) and Nettle tea to detoxify. If it was the fat-free yogurt from Sainsbury’s that caused such illness I have 2 words for Europe: REFRIGERATE your food or PASTEURIZE it! If it was the tea, I can think of 200 hundred better ways to detoxify and slim down. NOT worth it!

I had gone out the evening previously with G and some friends from his MBA program to a posh bar in Picadilly. Originally I was to meet them at the Groucho Grille but after the near body-cavity search and background check required to see the hostess and ask about their party, I found my way to them at Cocoon, a very cool bar/restaurant where the girls were either stylish or hookers and the men seemed to be successful or foreign. The sushi looked tasty but a bit out of my price range. We all congregated around a table (thankfully, not one where you have to pay 300 quid) that was great except for the fact that we were perched on footstools. I felt like a leprechaun or frog that just alighted on a lily pad. One of G’s friends bore an uncanny resemblance to Tiger Woods, truly eerie in low light and all were friendly and entertaining.

One interesting fact I did not know about LSE before that evening-apparently, all LSE students have wild massive orgies and tons of sex all of the time. If the popular opinion (of five people) is to be believed, people must be getting it on in class and the center of the library at high noon and twice on Thursdays. Huh, well, maybe in the International Relations department or those wacky Econometrics students because I haven’t noticed any of that to date. Have they seen the majority of people at LSE? I highly doubt they are getting busy all over the campus (which at 12,000 people over two square blocks and seven building would give you a mean standard deviation of….damn stats!). I found this personally hilarious and upon relaying our apparent friskiness to other members of my program that too asked where in the hell this was happening. Ahh yes, it must be those Pakistani policemen-they truly seem the type to go wild-okay, bad mental images. Suffice it to say-THAT IT A TOTAL MYTH TO MY AND SEVERAL PEOPLE’S KNOWLEDGE! It must be that famous European belief that all American girls are sluts-seriously, ask a lot of random (not the world traveled upper-class I went to Cambridge) guys and they seem to think that Americans have all starred in “Girls Gone Wild” at some point. I almost feel bad in pointing out our country’s Puritan foundations. Fun weekend though!