火雞節 Turkey Day!
Ok, I know 火雞節 fo2 gai1 zit3 isn't really a thing, but "Turkey Day" is our nickname for Thanksgiving. Sorry for those of you who were anxiously waiting to hear more about the friendly, neighborhood landlord, James, but James will have to wait. Turkey is more important than landlords. At least if you're North American.
Of course, Thanksgiving is not a recognized holiday in Hong Kong, or anywhere outside of North America, for that matter, but funnily enough, I seem to celebrate more in Hong Kong than I ever did in the US. Well, maybe I should say that Thanksgiving in America is all about quality while my celebrations in Hong Kong have been about quantity. When I say quality versus quantity, I am not talking about the food. I'm talking about the number of celebrations.
In the US, we don't need to work on Thanksgiving so someone in my family (sometimes me) is able to get up at three or four in the morning to start turkey preparations (and then slip back into a warm bed as the bird begins its five hours of cooking). We wake up a few hours later to munch on a half a bowl of cereal (gotta make sure our stomachs are very empty by lunch time) while we watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Our whole family gathers in a kitchen that was about the size of my first flat to cook together. At 1:00, we eat the bounty that we have prepared and the guests have brought. One day, bam. Thankful. Celebrated. Check.
In Hong Kong, on the other hand, there are all kinds of celebrations that you can take advantage of. Since we have to work on Thursday, our celebrating gets spread out to the entire week before and after Thanksgiving. I'm pretty sure I attended five Thanksgiving events one year. That said, the actual food part can be a bit spotty. I've been to my fair share of Thanksgiving dinners that had rice and pizza alongside the turkey. And let's not even talk about the cardboard turkeys that hotels pump out at $700 dollars a pop. I know that thankfulness is not tied to food, so I can be just as thankful with a slice of pizza as with a forkful of warm stuffing and gravy. Well, unless the pizza has corn or peaches on it. I would have to work very hard to be thankful for corn pizza.
This year I only had two celebrations, a new low for me. My parents and I actually had Indian food together, after which my mother made pumpkin pie to feel more traditional. I also had some friends over to my house and cooked the whole shebang. Ok, I didn't cook sweet potato casserole. But does anyone even like that anyway? And I had plain green beans instead of green bean casserole (I don't even know where to get crispy onions). And I may have cooked apple pie instead of pumpkin (in my defence, I had no time to let the pumpkin pie cool AND the mother cooked it at our family celebration).
The turkey was the fun part. Now that I have an oven, I was determined to cook a real turkey. The friend who gave me the oven told me that he had cooked a six-pound bird in it so just stick with the small ones. At the supermarket, I couldn't find the tag saying how much it weighed but I thought the turkey looked pretty small. It turns out that "pretty small" was still twelve pounds.
The afternoon of our dinner, I found myself googling "spatchcocking." That's just a fancy word for doing surgery on your turkey because you were dumb enough to buy such a big bird. It involves cutting out the backbone, flipping back the legs, and breaking the ribcage to make the turkey lie more flat. All of the Youtube tutorials on spatchcocking told me that I needed poultry shears. I was about to go to the hardware store to see if they had any large shears when I found my cleaver. That works...right?
Let's just say I'm not a very good aim with a cleaver. It was not a pretty job, but after some hacking, I got the backbone out and broke the ribcage. My turkey was indeed very flat. It was also very wide. Wider than my oven, in fact. I picked up the cleaver and was back at it again. In a jiffy (I am lying; it took a long time), I had the legs in my crockpot and the body in the oven, gently cooking over a pan of wine and veggies.
I cleaned up the carnage in the kitchen before my guests arrived. By the time the golden breast meat came out, you wouldn't even have known all the agonies I had gone through. Besides my severe lack of counter space which forced me to press-gang the air-purifier, stool, and the dish drainer into holding food for me, it all worked out.
And you know, I just might prefer Hong Kong Thanksgiving. There are fewer expectations when no other Americans are present. I can forget the sweet potato casserole. I don't have to wake up at three!
But if I do decide to do this again, I need to work on my cleaver skills. Unless anyone wants to buy me poultry shears....
Of course, Thanksgiving is not a recognized holiday in Hong Kong, or anywhere outside of North America, for that matter, but funnily enough, I seem to celebrate more in Hong Kong than I ever did in the US. Well, maybe I should say that Thanksgiving in America is all about quality while my celebrations in Hong Kong have been about quantity. When I say quality versus quantity, I am not talking about the food. I'm talking about the number of celebrations.
In the US, we don't need to work on Thanksgiving so someone in my family (sometimes me) is able to get up at three or four in the morning to start turkey preparations (and then slip back into a warm bed as the bird begins its five hours of cooking). We wake up a few hours later to munch on a half a bowl of cereal (gotta make sure our stomachs are very empty by lunch time) while we watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Our whole family gathers in a kitchen that was about the size of my first flat to cook together. At 1:00, we eat the bounty that we have prepared and the guests have brought. One day, bam. Thankful. Celebrated. Check.
In Hong Kong, on the other hand, there are all kinds of celebrations that you can take advantage of. Since we have to work on Thursday, our celebrating gets spread out to the entire week before and after Thanksgiving. I'm pretty sure I attended five Thanksgiving events one year. That said, the actual food part can be a bit spotty. I've been to my fair share of Thanksgiving dinners that had rice and pizza alongside the turkey. And let's not even talk about the cardboard turkeys that hotels pump out at $700 dollars a pop. I know that thankfulness is not tied to food, so I can be just as thankful with a slice of pizza as with a forkful of warm stuffing and gravy. Well, unless the pizza has corn or peaches on it. I would have to work very hard to be thankful for corn pizza.
This year I only had two celebrations, a new low for me. My parents and I actually had Indian food together, after which my mother made pumpkin pie to feel more traditional. I also had some friends over to my house and cooked the whole shebang. Ok, I didn't cook sweet potato casserole. But does anyone even like that anyway? And I had plain green beans instead of green bean casserole (I don't even know where to get crispy onions). And I may have cooked apple pie instead of pumpkin (in my defence, I had no time to let the pumpkin pie cool AND the mother cooked it at our family celebration).
The turkey was the fun part. Now that I have an oven, I was determined to cook a real turkey. The friend who gave me the oven told me that he had cooked a six-pound bird in it so just stick with the small ones. At the supermarket, I couldn't find the tag saying how much it weighed but I thought the turkey looked pretty small. It turns out that "pretty small" was still twelve pounds.
The afternoon of our dinner, I found myself googling "spatchcocking." That's just a fancy word for doing surgery on your turkey because you were dumb enough to buy such a big bird. It involves cutting out the backbone, flipping back the legs, and breaking the ribcage to make the turkey lie more flat. All of the Youtube tutorials on spatchcocking told me that I needed poultry shears. I was about to go to the hardware store to see if they had any large shears when I found my cleaver. That works...right?
Let's just say I'm not a very good aim with a cleaver. It was not a pretty job, but after some hacking, I got the backbone out and broke the ribcage. My turkey was indeed very flat. It was also very wide. Wider than my oven, in fact. I picked up the cleaver and was back at it again. In a jiffy (I am lying; it took a long time), I had the legs in my crockpot and the body in the oven, gently cooking over a pan of wine and veggies.
I cleaned up the carnage in the kitchen before my guests arrived. By the time the golden breast meat came out, you wouldn't even have known all the agonies I had gone through. Besides my severe lack of counter space which forced me to press-gang the air-purifier, stool, and the dish drainer into holding food for me, it all worked out.
And you know, I just might prefer Hong Kong Thanksgiving. There are fewer expectations when no other Americans are present. I can forget the sweet potato casserole. I don't have to wake up at three!
But if I do decide to do this again, I need to work on my cleaver skills. Unless anyone wants to buy me poultry shears....
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