Our thanksgiving dinner became a rather complicated story as it turned out several of the chemistry boys didn't have any plans for the big day. Therefore we arranged a potluck dinner in Ralph's (the new German Ph.D. student) studio.
Since 3/4 of the guests were non-Americans we got some instructions from Ralph's American girl friend regarding the authentic menu. After tasting it she concluded that we all did fine.
We had:
Turkey - Ben had purchased a 14 lb bird which according to internet-turkey-calculators should be able to feed about 20 people, but we didn't really have any leftovers. Cooking time: 5 hours.
'Stuffing' - bread cubes, walnuts, raisins, celery, olives and onion which contrary to expectation were prepared outside the turkey. Inside the turkey there were stuffed carrots.
Green bean casserole - baked in the oven, made from green beans in cream of mushroom. Very nice, and we didn't know this existed at all.
Mashed potatoes - Tue was in charge of this part and made a version with scallions and sour cream.
Cranberry sauce and brown gravy - contrary to our expectation the cranberry sauce was cold and shaped like the can it came in. Tue made a nice brown gravy - fluid and warm - from the turkey drippings.
Corn bread and ordinary bread - corn bread is somewhat like muffins (and a little sweet). Zarko made the wheat bread himself.
Eggnog - before we got the real desserts this curious drink was put on the table. We don't think we'll adopt this tradition!
Pumpkin pie and cheesecake - the pumpkin pie of course being the authentic dessert, but since Tue is well aware of Lisbeth's reservations towards this vegetable he had suggested that she made a cheesecake as alternative dessert. Both Ben and Martin were very happy about this. We noticed that there was some leftover pumpkin pie..
To all this Caroline and Martin had brought some nice wines, amongst others the popular Coppola red wine :-)
It was nice evening, even though we still don't understand why this day - when one gratefully commemorates that the first settlers survived the first winter on food donated by the native Americans - has to be celebrated, when one thinks of how they were thanked in the years that followed...
Now it's Christmas - we're sitting here on Christmas day and relaxing. But we do want to wish our readers a merry Christmas and show a few pictures of Santa Barbarian x-mas decorations. Yes, all of the little dots in both pictures are small light bulbs.
The smart thing about the important holidays over here is that Thanksgiving and Christmas are pretty close and that the food is quite similar. Therefore the supermarkets don't have to change a lot in their displays from late November to late December - cranberry sauce, potatoes, stuffing and of course frozen turkeys merely have to be re-stocked.
It certainly looks like Santa Claus thought well of us within the last week or so. A veritable surge of x-mas parcels, cards and goodies. It just might end up with a real x-mas after all ;-)
Now that the nights are cool one can sit down and dream of southern shores - such as the destination of our vacation a few months back.
Last week all x-mas gifts for relatives overseas were shopped, so now we only have to take care of the most important ones: our own of course :-)
We can't keep on just writing about the weather and various repairs in our apartment (due to plumbing issues in the apartment above ours we've recently had workers enter our place on 4-5 occasions spread over the course of more than a week), so let's present the places where Tue is most often found: Our kitchen and his fume hood.
On Sundays we often walk or bike a trip into the area near where we live. On a recent Sunday afternoon with mild weather we decided to walk back along the beach. The sun was setting and suddenly we saw a large pod of dolphins busy catching fish and jumping out of the water. All this to the sounds of seals (and/or sea lions) further out to sea - very idyllic!
It's December already and people are starting to decorate for x-mas. We'll show some pictures of that later, but first a picture we took this past summer of a more permanent decoration outside one of the houses around here.
An other reason not to any more visitors is that now we've thrown out the guest mattress. Apart from the fact that it feels like the living room is a little larger now it also has the nice effect that now we can turn on the heat. Until now the mattress was standing in front of our gas-heater mounted on the wall - burning gas inches away from nylon sounds like a recipe for bad things...
We have to admit that we've fallen a bit behind on our mailbox stories lately, bet here we go again with a selection of painted mailboxes from our old neighborhood
Our thanksgiving dinner became a rather complicated story as it turned out several of the chemistry boys didn't have any plans for the big day. Therefore we arranged a potluck dinner in Ralph's (the new German Ph.D. student) studio.
