A Taipei Thanksgiving

A year ago on Thanksgiving day we were in Pflugerville with my family. We ate lots of good food, had too many leftovers (as always) and even put up Christmas decorations after it was all over because Grandma and Grandpa were there. At the time, none of us knew what the coming year had in store for us: the ups and the downs.

This year we find ourselves in Taipei for Thanksgiving and that in and of itself gives us a lot to be thankful for. The theme for this year's dinner was How to Cook Thanksgiving Dinner without an Oven! Some people around here either ordered their dinner from local American restaurants or went to the American Club (a kind of Country Club) for their dinner. Bully to them, but around our house - WE COOK!

The only non-homemade dish we had this year was something called "Orange Soup". We've had the "Red Soup" with grilled cheese sandwiches in the past, and the "Orange Soup" looked very harvest-y, so we decided to give it a go. I added my own flair and re-named it "Harvest Soup". Despite my best efforts at marketing, I was the only one who ate it:



For the main dish, we re-created the "Chicken and Dressing in a Crock Pot" recipe we tried several weeks ago. It was even better this time as we didn't add as much chicken broth to the dressing (the chicken on top of the dressing provides the broth!) and we put the chicken back in a skillet to get crispy before serving. It was a big success:



And the dressing:



Believe it or not, sweet potatoes (or yams) are really big over here so we had no problem whipping some up with some butter and marshmallows. Amy (my sous chef) even had the idea to put them in our little toaster oven to give the marshmallows that "toasted" look. I'm so proud of her! They were yummy as well:



And finally, Thanksgiving wouldn't be complete without the Barclay chicken noodles. We hope that Grandma Barclay is smiling somewhere knowing that her recipes made it halfway around the world:



Desert is where you really get stuck without an oven. The kids wanted to make "Puppy Chow" so they went off to the store that morning and bought the ingredients and whipped this up. It was really good:



But you have to have pies for Thanksgiving! Without an oven, we were stuck, so we had to (gasp!) order out our pies. We ordered them from Wendel's, a cool little German bakery down the road. Pumpkin Pie was a must, but we also got an apple pie as well. The kids went to go pick them up yesterday morning while we cooked and they were packaged so cool!

They came in this little hat box thing:





The pumpkin pie looked too good to eat. So we decided to take it's picture and just have it as a centerpiece for the rest of the holidays. Just kidding. We devoured it:



The apple pie looked like something straight out of Grandma Weseloh's kitchen. It was yummy too:



We're happy, we're healthy, and we're thankful for our family and friends! And oh, yeah, we're thankful that we'll be home for Christmas! Happy Thanksgiving 2008 from the Ronamy crew: