So, after a wonderful month in the States and a busy month of Christmas cooking and covert elfing, I'm back to bring you up to date! I'm going to skip ahead to Christmas and fill in the blanks as time allows.
Five other expats joined us for a Korean-Scottish-English-Canadian-American Christmas in China at our place. Naturally, it started with an adventure--after opening gifts I went to start the stuffing only to realize we didn't have gas or hot water. A few phone calls later and we luckily got the meter reset so we were back in business. Then we realized our turkey had yet to be cleaned. True, the intestines and stomach were gone but it still proved to be a treasure trove of surprises!
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| Brian's Christmas quote of the year: "It's as if it's giving birth to itself!" |
Our Christmas was a BYOO affair. Bring Your Own Oven. Since our ovens are all tiny things that can only hold one dish at a time we needed three to pull this meal off! And thank goodness one of our friends has the biggest oven you can find here--it was just big enough for the turkey. It came with a roasting pan that slides in the oven in place of a rack. But here's where the fun begins. The roasting pan is only wide enough for a hair's width of overlap on the tracks. So when you add a 12lb turkey, the weight of it is enough to sag the pan and send it crashing straight down on top of the element. After repeating this comedy of errors multiple times we ended up putting a mixing bowl on the bottom of the oven between the elements and just set the pan on the bowl. Well, transferring the weight to the bowl made the bottom of the oven pop off, so then we had to shim that back into place as best we could. We were estimating 3 hours cooking time and it was looking pretty darn good around that time. So we took it out, but realized it wasn't ready yet. So back in it goes and we're checking it every 15 minutes or so. About 45 minutes in the internal temp still hasn't risen and we're commenting that we must have maxed out the oven, because it is now cold. Turns out we never turned it back on. Oops! So another 30 minutes more in an oven that's actually ON, and we had a juicy, delicious bird! Phew!
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| Sewing up the bird China-style, with a quilting needle and yarn. |
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| How I spent my days the last 3 weeks |
All in all, I couldn't have imagined a better Christmas in China.
