(feasts)

Yesterday's belated Thanksgiving celebration was a total success : ) The food was every bit delicious, and (just as importantly) abundant. The smells, tastes, and company more than made up for the hassles of preparing for the day.

The giant feast of yesterday was the second fête in a series of three assistant get-togethers planned in the span of just a week! Tuesday, Simon hosted a celebration of St. Andrew's Day and treated us to some Scottish specialties--specifically haggis, neeps (turnips), tatties (potatoes), truffles, and some nice scotch (which the Scottish just call whiskey, as it turns out). My contribution was a caramel apple pie, below. Since the pie was so classically American for a Scottish dinner, I attempted to bring it into theme with a little Scottish flag. Can you find it?

Little cooking haggis balls. Click here to read about it--it's surprisingly tasty, and everyone enjoyed it! This kind was in plastic, rather than sheep stomach, though--I guess the owners of the British specialties shop weren't allowed to bring back the stomach-wrapped variety ;)

There's the spread--Haggis, neeps, tatties, and if you look carefully you can see an orange cream-like soda called Irn Bru which is typically Scottish and full of caffeine.

Moving on to yesterday's American Thanksgiving extravaganza! Check out that table--I was totally impressed with everyone's contributions. We had just about everything, which was no small accomplishment! The hardest-to-come-by items were probably the cranberry sauce and the turkey, but they made it! Also, since this is my blog and all, I'm going to go ahead and say that I was pretty proud of the turkey, homemade bread, and pumpkin pies I contributed. Totally worth all the time and effort--even the clean-up afterwards.

Desserts! The dessert "options" were as bountiful as the main dishes. Options is in quotation marks because I think everyone had some of every dessert--there was no need to make a choice! You can see pumpkin pie, haribo gummies, walnut tart, and two apple-plum crumbles in this picture, but there was also panna cotta with fresh raspberry sauce and chocolate coconut truffles. In line with tradition, everyone's entire afternoon was dedicated to slowly wearing through the copious food supply. What a great day's work!

The pictures of the food above this one are the before pictures, this one is the during picture...

...And here's after. Limited space resulted in us storing our plates under the coffee table. Why didn't we just take them to the kitchen, you ask? Let me respond with another question: What would we have done for seconds and thirds between game rounds if we did that?

And finally, the closest to a group shot we could get in the smallish room. Hard not to notice that our choice in pants was not nearly as distinctive as the dishes we all brought, though...

So--two feasts down, one proper English tea party to go. I'm sure it will be lovely.