Happi Sankusugibingu!

This year, I had an actual Thanksgiving dinner. It was a 3-day weekend, so I had it last Sunday.

Many western foods are hard to come by here.
It's not as bad as I was told before I got here. I can find flour tortillas, cheddar cheese, maple syrup, and peanut butter at the big supermarket in the center of town. Sometimes I can even get a whole bunch of celery (not just one stalk) or even cilantro. (Though all these things are impossible to find in the rural areas.) But the one vital thing you can't get anywhere is turkey. The only place I've ever seen it is at Subway, and the closest one is in Chiba City.

No one here knows what Thanksgiving is, and though they know that the word for turkey is "shichimencho" (seven-faced poultry), they don't know what one looks like. There is a "Labor Thanksgiving Day" in November, but it's more like Labor Day, and it's really just one of the monthly days off for government employees and students.

Pumpkins in Japan are the small, green kabocha you see sometimes in organic supermarkets. They're sweeter than American ones, and you can't get canned pumpkin for pumpkin pie. You also can't find canned chicken stock, anything cranberry (except dried or watered-down "juice"), fresh herbs, stuffing, or Redi-Whip.

Last year's Thanksgiving was pretty dismal. There was a charity buffet at a Chiba gaijin bar, though I use the term buffet loosely. It started late, the table was tiny, there was no gravy, the stuffing was awful, and we had to wait 1/2 hour to get more of anything after it ran out. That wouldn't be so bad except that while all us foreigners made a nice orderly line to get even portions of everything, these all these Japanese chicks who'd never seen turkey before bum-rushed the table and piled their plates high with it,ignoring the stuffing and cranberry sauce. By the time half the line got through, it was all gone and everyone had to wait. Each time they brought more turkey out it was the same thing.
I'm all for helping out charity, but I left there that night feeling disappointed and empty.
So, yeah, it was pretty sad.

This year, I decided that there would be none of that foolishness, so I wanted to host my own Thanksgiving dinner with my friends. I could get everything I needed through the Foreign Buyer's Club, which is awesome.
But Japanese cuisine doesn't have a lot of baking, so most Japanese kitchens don't come equipped with ovens. Luckily, I have a microwave/oven combo that's a really neat wonder of Japanese technology, but it's only 30cm wide. (Look at me, thinking in metric!)
Hoping they would fit, I ordered 2 turkeys the size of large chickens; only 7 lbs. each. Tiny!

They arrived Saturday morning in the mail, frozen solid. So I spent all Saturday defrosting them in the sink and running around town, looking for all the cooking hardware I didn't have and ingredients I doubted I would find.

What I found by pure luck and ingenuity: a cooking pan and rack (supposed to be for draining blood from fish or oil from tempura; a rolling pin (supposed to be for making noodles); a bunch of celery (imported from America); powdered sage; a meat thermometer; butter

What I didn't find: fresh herbs that weren't ricola or basil (they love basil on pizza here, and tabasco on spaghetti); pie crust; a pie pan larger than 12cm (luckily my neighbor had one)

I spent all Sunday cooking those little turkeys. I was afraid they wouldn't fit in my glorified microwave, but they did. I was afraid they wouldn't cook evenly, but they did. Though I had to tilt the pan a little because it was too long.
I'd never made a Thanksgiving turkey before; usually that's my parents' job. (I'm usually in charge of mashed potatoes and gravy). But luckily, my dad taught me how to roast a chicken when I was 16, so it went off without a hitch.

And don't worry that I did the whole thing myself. I'm not so naive to think that I could. I set it up as a potluck, and everybody signed up for a different dish. I helped with the pie, and we had all 4 kitchens in our building going at once.

I was really worried that there wouldn't be enough for everyone. But since everybody made a lot of food, there were actually leftovers! (Except the stuffing I made, I'm proud to say.) Everything was really delicious, and it felt like a real Thanksgiving. Not just because of the food, but because it was all us good friends together, enjoying each other's company.