Desert Turkey Day 2011

Well, last night I brought home a huge bucket of KFC, screamed "Happy Thanksgiving" as I walked in the door, and declared that as the sum total of my turkey-related preparations.  We were supposed to have a Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the school, so I thought I was off the hook.  Then the school's event was postponed...because it might RAIN here.  In fact, we had an incredibly lovely cool front two days ago, and now we are in the midst of perfection.  Low 80's during the day, 60 at 6 AM this morning.  Having been acclimated to the super hot weather, this actually feels cool.  

So the official T-Day dinner postponed left me non-plussed for today, the "official day."  To top it off, this morning, I watch this awesome video from Tanta Mary about cooking turkey.  So I decided at 10 AM this morning that I would, in fact, make Thanksgiving dinner.

We have a store called "MegaMart" that stocks all the magical Western things, or at least the extent of which you can get in Doha.  There's also a "Baby MegaMart," which is about the size of a 7-11 but chock full of all the important stuff, like fresh cranberries and Fritos.  So after work, I went by and bought two turkey breasts, stuffing mix, mushrooms, celery, oranges, fresh ginger, fresh corn on the cob, and two half gallons of Blue-freaking-Bell Ice Cream for the sum total of $120 USD.  We won't discuss that each ear of corn cost $2 USD or that the BlueBell was $9 per carton.  Because what matters is that in 15 minutes I had the fixin's for T-Day dinner.  Besides, gas is like 90 cents per gallon.  It all balances out...sort of.

So here's to our second Thanksgiving in Doha.  True to form, it involved three hours of cooking, 30 minutes of eating, two dropped knives, seventeen licks of butter straight off of finders, and three fights among the children.  But the turkey breast (Butterball!) was excellent, and the corn was sweet and delicious.  I just needed some more of the buttermilk pie and some of Mamaw's dinner rolls to finish it off.

Yes, that's gravy served out of a teapot. Desert practicality.

Happy Thanksgiving and Masha'Allah, y'all.