Americanish Thanksgiving

I got it in my head that I wanted to attempt to pull off a real American Thanksgiving. The first step was to find an accomplice in this endeavor and since there was no real competition for this role, I immediately called my only American friend Miles. He agreed. Miles is incidentally one of my only friends with an oven so this worked out well in multiple ways. (By the way, you really don't think about how much American food is made in an oven until there isn't one available!) So, armed with recipes I had copied from the Internet and seriously limited culinary skills, we went to the supermarket to see what we could find for our feast. Here were some questionable substitutions we made:

green apples instead of celery

butternut squash instead of sweet potatoes

bags of white, green and pink marshmallows (the pink ones are strawberry flavored, the green ones I'm still not sure about)

onions to fry instead of French's Fried Onions (like anything could replace their canned goodness)

Our biggest problem turned out to be a lack of casserole dishes. Having no real use for ovens here, there is not much use for baking dishes. In the end we had to use what we had, which included a large glass salad bowl for the stuffing which did not break (as the phone call with a horrible connection from my mother in the middle of our adventure suggested it might) but did not cook very evenly either. At the end of the night, we served our friends the following:

• Chicken made by Miles' wonderful cook of a roommate. She also made peas and potatoes.
• Stuffing which really did taste like stuffing, even with the apples and the 15 minutes it spent in the microwave trying to cook the middle
• Green beans not casserole. Due to the lack of French's Fried Onions and the fact that we gave up on frying our own, we made a mixture of green beans, sauteed onions and cream of mushroom soup (Knorr's not Cambell's), sprinkled with almonds and baked. It was not horrible.
• Butternut Squash with maple syrup and melted marshmallows. Having not enough room in the oven, we decided to make this one on the stove.

All in all, it was a wonderful evening. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!