Double Thanksgiving

We have so much to be thankful for this year, that we really had to celebrate Thanksgiving twice.  Despite a few bumps in the road, we've had a smooth transition to our new life in KL, and it's a good life.  The girls are happy in school, we finally have all of our stuff, and we have made so many new friends.  The only way to show them how thankful we were for all of them was to have two celebrations.  

Our first celebration was the regular Thanksgiving meal on Thursday.  We invited our social sponsor family and some of Jeff's friends from work.  It was big enough to feel festive, but not so big that we didn't have a seat for everyone.

Even though Noby has worked for many American families, she's never worked for anyone who actually cooked Thanksgiving dinner, so she was super excited for a new cooking challenge.  She insisted on cutting the spine out of the turkey herself, but since I'm taller and have more leverage, I cracked the breast to flatten it.  Teamwork!

She also did a great job cubing the bread for the stuffing.

The girls picked off some while it was still fresh.  We left it out to dry, and they would dig through to find ones at the bottom that were still soft.  I didn't stop them, because it was natural bread tilling.

We also added a special Asian touch.  Jeff loves spicy morning glory, or kangkong as it's called here, so of course, we had to have some of that too.

The girls were excited to be hosting company, so they got all dressed up.

The turkey was smaller than what I've cooked before, so I'm afraid I left it in a bit too long, but we had the special turkey gravy to put on it, and everyone said it was delicious.

Plus, there was no shortage of food.

We had to have a little break before dessert.

It was a great Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone had fun, but it was missing one of my favorite parts of Thanksgiving, the morning brunch parade.  Because we're on the other side of the world from New York, the timing is all off.  A lot of people wait and do their Thanksgiving meal on Saturday, especially since school isn't off on Thursday.  In order to get in all my favorite parts of my favorite holiday, we decided to host Parade Day on Saturday.  Jeff recorded the parade, so that we could show it on a loop and serve all day brunch, which is our favorite meal to host.  Having an all day open house also allowed us to invite lots more people, which is great because so many people have helped make KL feel like home for us.

An essential brunch dish for us is sausage balls, and since this is a Muslim country where pork can be difficult to find, we had to figure out the best place to get our base sausage.  Luckily, KL is a highly international city, and there's enough of a market for pork to support specialty stores, like one very appropriately called Sausage KL.  They have a restaurant that serves breakfast, so Jeff and I decided to go check it out.

The breakfast was delicious, and while we ate, we looked over their menu of different sausage types.

We ended up buying the Lincolnshire and Spicy Italian as our main meats, but I couldn't resist getting 500g of the Cranberry & Thyme one for fun.  ALL the sausage balls we made got eaten, so for the next round, we're going to try more flavors and buy more meat.

The other thing we wanted to do was have a Bloody Mary and mimosa self service area.  We had hunted high and low for tomato juice and Bloody Mary mix, and we got lucky enough to find some the week before Thanksgiving.  I had also purchased a few different kinds of fruit juice to make the mimosas more interesting.  The problem was, we didn't really have the appropriate serving equipment to keep that many different kinds of liquid cold in style.  There just happens to be an IKEA close by though, and without much effort, I convinced one of my friends to go with me to see what we could find.  We got super lucky.  I bought a large and small ice bucket, several glass carafes, and a bunch more champagne glasses.  They were about $1 each and came in boxes of 6, so we may never use all 12, but we have them if we need them.

On the day, we set all the choices for glasses up in one area.

We were very pleased with the drink mixing station's final set up.

We put out some food to start, but left plenty of space for more.

We cued up the parade and watched a bit before the first guests arrived.  We had said open house from 10-5, and we had people from 10:30 on.  It was so much fun.  Some people brought food or drinks, and some people just brought themselves, but everyone found something they enjoyed to eat or drink, and the parade was a big hit.  For some people it was their first time seeing it, and for others it was a welcome taste of home.  Noby helped us make sure we didn't run out of clean dishes, and Jeff and I were able to host and really enjoy everyone's company.  By the end we were exhausted, but I'm so glad we did it.

We didn't have anything planned for Sunday, but it was a lovely day, and Elena really wanted to go to the pool, so Jeff went with her.  They took our new floating chairs down and just drifted around the pool chatting for a couple hours, another thing to be thankful for.

This has been a difficult year in many ways, and I love that Thanksgiving gives us a chance to stop, reflect, and share with people who we are thankful for.