Post-Thanksgiving Break-Down

How was your Thanksgiving? I zipped back to San Francisco, and I have to confess that Thanksgiving meal, food-wise, was a small disappointment, but it was great to see family. Usually, we do shabu-shabu for Thanksgiving at a family friend's place, as our own extended family is often out of town.

This year we stayed at home and had some family over. My dad cooked, and he upped and went rogue on me. Not wanting to do shabu-shabu I can handle, my dad's Chinese cooking is fantastic. Note the qualifier on Chinese cooking though. Dad decided to make a more traditional Thanksgiving meal, except he isn't entirely clear on what that entails. He knew there was supposed to be a turkey, but not wanting to grapple with that hurdle, he bought a half-turkey from a Chinese butcher. You know, those Chinese butchers that usually have half the carcass of a roast-pig hanging in the window, alongside some mahogany-colored Peking duck and glistening poached chicken?

There was no stuffing. No mashed potatoes. No gravy.

Instead, we had a ying and yang carrot and celery soup. Roasted cauliflower and green beans, which sounds delicious, but dad likes his cauliflower on the crisp side, so let your visions of deliciously charred and tender cauliflower slip away. He roasted some lamb, which was quite nice, but all-in-all I would have preferred a table laden with garlic and black-pepper crab, shrimp and egg stir-fry, a big heaping plate of seafood noodles, Chinese broccoli wok-cooked with cured pork-belly, some steaming bowls of wonton soup, and drunken chicken. Mmmm, that would have been so good.

Well, there's always Christmas!