Food

          Sorry about the long silence. It's been a busy couple of weeks.

          Meghan and Becky arrived one fine Saturday, and I met them at Heathrow in the wee hours of the morn. It was wonderful having them here, and also a little strange. London along with bits of home all at once.
          What did we do? There was such a lot packed into that week. Well, when I took them on their very first ride on the Tube, they thought the train was insulting them as it said, "This train is for Cockfosters."  We went to Abbey Road, museums (the Natural History Museum for the third time for me, and it was still just as exciting), shows, Primark, and just wandered around. They also saw the touristy stuff - Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London (where Becky got to see where lots of people were killed). They went on a Jack the Ripper tour, and we saw the Sherlock Holmes museum.

          And, of course, there was Thanksgiving. Which was ... a triumphant success!  We made a turkey. Well, actually, we couldn't find a whole turkey, so we bought turkey breast (still on the bones) and two turkey legs, and made that instead. It still looked like a whole turkey.
          The night before, we'd ripped up two loafs of bread (the real stuff, quality french bread with a golden crust) and dried it out. On Thanksgiving, we sauteed (according to Meghan's dad's instructions) an onion, some garlic, and some celery, mixed it up with the dry bread, sprinkled on some rosemary, and doused it in butter. We hid it under the turkey breast, as there wasn't really an inside into which to stuff it.
          Nicholas and I constructed a roasting pan out of ridiculous amounts of tin foil. The turkey bits were then marinated in oil, butter, salt, and pepper. We stuck it in the oven and drenched it with butter every fifteen minutes.
          Meghan made her famous truffles (and we had dark chocolate to spare ... never a bad thing), which we attacked.

          We had a magnificent spread. Two kinds of sparkling juice (including white grape with pomegranate and rose), crescent rolls (made by Brittany), sweet potato fries (made by Nicholas), steamed green beans, real mashed potatoes, a salad (made of not-iceberg lettuce), turkey and stuffing of course (which were ridiculously tasty and made us feel proud and capable), and even cranberry sauce.
          Luke (one of Brittany's English flatmates) joined us for dinner. It was his first Thanksgiving, and we had fun explaining the origin of the holiday. "The natives taught the colonists to grow corn and survive, and Thanksgiving marks the cooperation between the two cultures. And then there was the genocide and we gave them all syphilis. Happy Thanksgiving!" He managed three servings of everything, putting all of us seasoned Thanksgivingers to shame.

          On a slightly unrelated note, I figured out the topic for my senior thesis: food. Cooking, eating, meals with family, eating out, foreign food, vegetarianism, comfort food, grocery shopping, eating disorders, fad diets ... the possibilities are endless! And we're not talking some dry academic treatise. No, no, my friends. This will be creative non-fiction! Narrative prose recounting my personal experiences with food! Which ... actually ... is probably not going to be that exciting. But I was excited. I have a topic!
          This year's Thanksgiving will almost certainly be the basis for one of my essays. As will, perhaps, the next story I'll relate:

          Yesterday (this being after Becky and Meghan had departed for windy Chicago), Brittany, Brynn, and Gonzo decided to have a picnic. So we grabbed a blanket and all the Thanksgiving leftovers and proceeded to set up camp in the middle of the courtyard. People thought we were crazy. We yelled at Nick to join us. So we sat there in the cold weather, eating McVities with Nutella (a stroke of genius on the part of Brittany).
          And now, the long haul to the end of the grading period. Two academic essays to finish and a couple hundred more words for creative writing portfolios.

          Deep breath. Ready, set, go.