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There's no Thanksgiving in Japan *sigh* but that doesn't mean we can't bring thanksgiving here!

My own personal brand of cooking

What bugs me out is that there is an official Japanese "thanksgiving" of which people are off from work but people still don't do it! So odd, it also comes a few days before the one in america, I think canada has it at a different time as well. But anyway, its kind of important to american culture so this year I wanted to do it up, I half-heartly put up some invites online to gather people not knowing what would happen and the turnout was amazing. My english speaking friends had no outlet for celebrating thanksgiving and my Japanese friends had never had turkey (otuside of disney world which really isn't a good example, totally different). That response got me fired up I was motivated I wanted to deliver to meet everyone's expectations.

So after a lot of looking around I finally found a handful of places that actually sold Turkey. Due to planning complications I wasn't able to get an already cooked one on time. Also, one of the quirks of Japan is NO STOVES. I still don't understand this but most apartments don't come with a stove. In any case I looked up ole trusty youtube and got a few recipies. Toaster oven and Deep fry methods! So for planning I set up a way to get it all done within a few hours, which is actually faster than a real oven.

For toaster oven I cut it in half and cooked it half at a time. This only took 1hr 20 minutes each half.

From one to done in 4800 seconds, or half or one rather...

For the other one I dipped the whole thing into a deep pot to deep fry it. This took only 40 minutes but was more risky with the prospect of oil flying everywhere, touching the fire and you know burning everything in a mile radius.

Minum spillage

Luckily everything went fine without causing an international incident and surved up the two turkey. Everyone loved it.

One last bit, I was able to make gravy as well! For this I took the Turkey innards, the turkey juice from the toaster oven and some vegitables etc. Put it all together in a pan, threw in some flour and boom, savory gravy. Only problem was I didn't know how to create a large enough volume but everyone got to have 1 serving with gravy so that worked out well.

All gravy

It was a great event, my brother visited from out of town, I was surrounded by friends and everyone had a great time.

yaay