* I am eating the bacon, leek, and cheese pasty today. It’s good but I am realising they all taste the same. That could be due to the pastry part, though.

Thanksgiving dinner went amazingly! Dan and I cooked all day (starting around 1 PM after a trip to the grocery store – dinner wasn’t scheduled to be until 10 PM because Richard had to work). The menu consisted of turkey (10 lb), mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, pumpkin pie (from scratch!), yams (by Luke), stuffing, green beans(which we didn’t end up eating for too much food), and to make it more English Dan insisted on Yorkshire puddings and sausages!

We fed 13 mouths and had, basically, one plate of leftovers, pretty well done, I’d say. I’m proud of myself for cooking a turkey and two pumpkin pies from scratch having never attempted either before and I’m proud of Dan for cooking at all, since he’s never attempted anything before!

The story of the pumpkin pie; I suggested making a pumpkin pie only to receive great cheers of enthusiasm. Apparently, Anna had made a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving last year, however, she brought the ingredients with her from America. So, unknowingly, I had just agreed to something much more complicated than I had intended. You see, not only do they not have pumpkin pie in this country, they don’t really have pie, period. They have tarts, and cakes, but not pie. Meaning that even finding a pie crust at the grocery store was a challenge, and in the end I used something called a pastry case, which was only about a centimeter and a half deep and really thick. Definitely not what I would call a pie crust. And so, after buying a really big (hindsight would say too big) pumpkin and cutting it into tiny bits and then peeling all of those tiny bits, Dan and I boiled those tiny bits, then mashed them into tinier, pulpier bits and added milk and spices, among other things, and crossed our fingers while pouring the lumpy, sloppy mixture into our “pie” crusts.  As you can see, they came out a little darker than would have been ideal but the crust was so small that it started to burn, so we took a gamble and pulled the pies out before the timer went off. After sitting on the counter for a few hours the pies solidified into what looked like two pretty decent pies. The verdict on taste? Some damn good pies. It may have also helped that my tasters had only ever had pumpkin pie once before.