Belated Thanksgiving Dinner!

Belated Thanksgiving Dinner 2005 Dear readers, I hereby announce that I just had my belated Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m officially stuffed now. The reason why I still celebrate it alone here in Japan is explained in my 2004 Thanksgiving dinner entry, and the reason hasn’t changed. The menu this time was not too different from last year’s Thanksgiving dinner, but there were some improvements. I made the same stuffed chicken breast, but for the stuffing I used this recipe today, because I’d always wanted to try making rice-stuffed chicken. I knew that the Thai rice I can find here will never be like wild rice, but I was willing to risk it. What’s more, hazelnuts called for in the recipe sounded absolutely tempting. All-in-one plate As expected, the rice made the stuffing mushy, but it tasted pretty good because of the hazelnuts! I love hazelnuts in anything, but I wasn’t sure if they’d go with chicken. They did :) I’m so happy that I bought a small bag of hazelnuts at an imported food shop in Kobe (don’t ask me when). Maybe I shouldn’t have added a little honey to the cranberry sauce… It was just an idea that popped up in my mind at the last minute. With the nutty flavor from the stuffing, I guess the sauce didn’t really need to be sweetened. Another change from last year was the vegetables. I cooked carrots and string beans, because last year the frozen green peas turned out terrible! Mashed potato was the same instant stuff as last year, but without gravy this time. I also used a different cornbread recipe today. Actually I was going to add the leftover sour cream, too, but I forgot. :( And the dessert! Yep, apple pie again, but this year, I made an apple crumble pie. (Maybe I made a mistake in conversion?? My crumbles obviously had too much butter and didn’t crumble at all, so I ended up adding some extra flour and eventually sugar, too. :P) I didn’t want this pie to occupy my oven for too long, so I pre-cooked the apple slices and used a pre-baked pie shell from the store. BTW, the ice cream I put on the warm apple pie had vanilla beans in it. Yay! I promise. I’ll get some exercise tonight…. * I uploaded some photos of autumn leaves here, if you want to take a look.