Nice and Warm Thanksgiving

This whole thanksgiving weekend has been so beautiful here in NY. It's nice and warm about 15-18 C. I had a lovely thanksgiving evening with some awesome people. A friend of mine invited me to their thanksgiving party. Her friend hosted at his place in Williamsburg. It was an awesome group of people - very nice, kind, good looking, intelligent young people. We are all about the same age. Some of them are from Minnesota and some are from Texas and there are also two Germans. So it was interesting mix of people.

We had some email exchange beforehand planning the menu who's bringing what. We all brought one or two dishes. I made my very FIRST pumpkin pie and green bean casserole!! They turned out delicious! I used to be critical of American cooking and thought it was so lame. But although I'm known to be a great cook, due to my own unfamiliarity of cooking methods and ingredients, even those simple things gave me quite an unexpected sweats that morning. But they all turned out great.

I arrived there around 3 pm and we all started preparing things for our feast. Some of us were cutting turkey to pieces, someone making the gravy, someone making ice-cream (yeah we had homemade vanilla ice-cream!), someone making pie. It was quite fun at the kitchen. Good thing that it was a big kitchen. We were all crowded there.

Everyone brought tremendous amount of food! I LOVE seeing a lot of food so it was very entertaining for me not only to see it but also to eat a lot of it! :). So our menu had -
-traditional whole roasted turkey
- zucchini and sausage stuffing
-two kinds of mash sweet potatoes
-my green bean casserole
-goat cheese tart
-real Russian beet salad (made by a Russian)
-sauteed broccoli
-cranberry sauce and gravy

For desserts, we had three different pies - my homemade pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, apple blueberry pie and homemade vanilla ice-cream. YUM!!

After the delicious feast, we hanged out there and chatted. Then we cleaned up doing all the dishes etc. After we cleaned up, we started playing 'Taboo". I really suck at that game. After 8 years in U.S., it's still hard for me to describe words in a few seconds. We divided two teams- boys and girls. 3 guys and 3 girls. But since the other two girls were very good, we won!

I have been so lucky with meeting great people here in U.S., both in CO and now in NY as well. I can't be more thankful for that. So although I don't have a family here, I had a wonderful thanksgiving after all.