Necessity is...

After almost 3 months (can you believe it?) here in Taipei we have discovered just about where everything is that we might need to access: grocery stores, markets, bakeries, restaurants, our doctor's office, a post office, the MRT station, the school/church, etc.

In terms of food, we've either found what we're used to eating back home (i.e. beans), adjusted our recipe just a little bit (i.e. chili), or just do without for now (i.e. BBQ without Korean in front of it).

Because we don't have an oven, we've been thinking that turkey and dressing would fall into the "do without for now" category, but I've probably been spending just a bit too much free cerebral time thinking about the prospect of Thanksgiving coming and going without turkey and dressing.

(Sure, some people here like to go out and eat at the various American establishments for Thanksgiving because it's not a holiday here in Taiwan. But that's just ... wrong. Thanksgiving is as much about the cooking as it is about the eating.)

Our friend lately has been the crock pot when we're not going local. Beans, chili, chicken, etc. So I got to thinking - what is dressing if not a variation on a bread pudding? Why couldn't we cook it in the crock pot? So I thought this weekend we would do a Thanksgiving "dry run" to see if it would be good. After discussing with my mom, she said that my grandma used to brown the chicken and then place it on top of the dressing.

So Amy bought a chicken (I think a turkey might be a tad big for our crock pot) and the stuff to make dressing. By the way, since we don't have an oven to make corn bread, Amy has found a recipe online for cornbread pancakes and has mixed it a little with her mom's recipe. The result is quite good - and a pancake is a pefect way to mix cornbread and beans (pancake on the bottom of the bowl, beans on top).

First step: clean the chicken. We normally buy our chicken from the market, but since we didn't have time to buy one this weekend, Amy bought a whole chicken at the store. After 3 months here, not much surprises me, but when I pulled the chicken out of the bag...

The neck seemed to be a little long for some reason...

Everything about that packaged chicken seemed so Wal-Mart to me that I guess this was kind of a shock. The feet were tucked into the butt - toenails and all.

So I cut the chicken in half and browned - just like my grandma. If this were smell-a-blogger you'd be in heaven right now because it smelled delicious.

Within minutes the peanut gallery started chiming in - "What's that smell? Why are you cooking so late? That smells good!"

Oh - what about the head and the toenails? They made for a fantastic high-speed broth for the stuffing.

Then it all went into the crock pot for a slow cook overnight so that it would be ready for Sunday dinner after church. On Sunday morning we awoke to a heavenly aroma throughout the house. We learned that because the chicken sat on top of the stuffing that we probably didn't need to use as much broth for the dressing because it was really moist.

So far the tasting has been successful. A mix of Amy's family recipes (the stuffing) and my family's cooking heritage (browning the chicken and cooking it on top of the stuffing). I think everybody is going to be high-tailing it out of church today because of lunch.

I'll be sure and let you know how it ends up, but I think we all know the answer to that one.

...the mother of invention.