Thanksgiving 2019

This year's Thanksgiving was on November 28. My birthday was a week earlier, which is as far away from Thanksgiving as it ever gets. Sometimes they are both on the same day and we kill two birds with one hand. Or one bush. However the saying goes. Sometimes, like this year, we concentrate on one day and I mostly nap on the other.

My roommates are Canadian. Their Thanksgiving is in October. Nothing about that makes any sense, so we celebrate in November like human beings. At least, when we are all in the same country. Last year I had Thanksgiving dinner at Flaherty's, an Irish pub in Barcelona. It was a pretty good night. They even gave me free chocolate cake because it was my birthday. But I was surrounded by strangers.

When in Hong Kong, we do as the Hongkongers do and go out to some fancy restaurant. A few years ago, we went to Agua Roma, an Italian/Japanese restaurant known more for the city views outside their giant windows than the food. Before that, it was Otto e Mezzo, now called 8 1/2 Otto e Mezzo Bombana, an Italian restaurant with a celebrity Italian chef, and supposedly the only 3 star Michelin Italian restaurant outside of Italy. The food was good, but far from the best Italian food I have ever eaten. I have always thought the best restaurants are the little holes in walls that the Michelin people will never know about.

Sometimes we are all in the same place at the same time, but not in a Thanksgiving mood. In November 2017, I had just gotten out of the hospital, was still adjusting to no sense of smell, and ended a relationship. A party was not on my to do list.

We were all in Hong Kong this Thanksgiving, and in relatively decent health. Technically, I am recovering from a hemorrhagic stroke, but this recovery has been a walk on a cake compared to recovering from the craniotomy. I think the biggest difference, other than brain surgery versus no surgery, is how much of a surprise the craniotomy was. That came out of nowhere. The stroke was a surprise, but always a possibility lurking in the corner. I am also far more confident this time around. The first time you get knocked down, you wonder if you can really get back up again. By the second time, you have done it before, so you know you can sing the songs that remind you of the good times.

I may not be ready to run a marathon just yet, but I can eat dinner with my friends. Rather than go out to an overpriced restaurant filled to the rafters with Chinese people who want to experience an “authentic” Thanksgiving meal of pasta and cereus soup, we decided to make something at home. Past Thanksgivings we hosted had a pretty small guest list. It spiraled out of control this year, for some reason. In a place like Hong Kong, if you invite 10 people, 5 will probably show up. Everyone is busy with work, out of town, or has other plans. Thursdays are not generally free for most. This year, we invited 36 people and 38 showed up. Fortunately, we were prepared.

We don't live in the largest apartment. It is big enough for us, and has a spare bedroom for guests or to store living room furniture. With the sofa and coffee table in the spare bedroom, that really opened up the living room/dining room area. With another table or two, we could have even crammed in more people.

The few times we hosted Thanksgiving, we cooked everything at home. Since we anticipated more guests this year, we ordered out. Almost every restaurant in Hong Kong will deliver, and the few that do not are associated with companies that deliver food for them. Having a restaurant cook your meal and eating it at home is a simple transaction. Unfortunately, we did not particularly care for anyone's Thanksgiving menu.

Plenty of restaurants in Hong Kong cater to Americans and other expats on Thanksgiving. Most of their special menus have something wrong. They are either small, like Main St Deli, or have too much Chinese or European influence, like Posto Pubblico. Our solution was to pick and choose from several different restaurants. Since they all delivered to us, all we had to do was place the orders and pay for everything. The number of separate deliveries never made any difference.

Fini's delivered apple stuffing. Frank's sent us cranberry sauce, honey glazed Brussels sprouts, macaroni and cheese, and buttermilk biscuits. From Limewood, cornbread and pecan pie with a bourbon whipped cream. Corn on the cob, potatoes, green beans, and all the fruit we used to make fruit salad came from the Yau Ma Tei fruit market. There was plenty of other food, but those were the most popular dishes.

When I was a child, Thanksgiving was a feast that would kill you if you ate it every day. No one ever looked at the table and asked about gluten. These days, we have friends who are allergic to this and cannot eat that. One of them would literally die if he ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. To avoid any fatalities in our home, we ordered extra dessert from the Cakery, a bakery that specializes in sugar free, gluten free and vegan desserts. Personally, I think vegan pie is a crime against humanity. Not because pumpkin pie is traditionally made with slabs of beef, but because pie crust without butter is like pasta without olive oil. We ordered a vegan pumpkin pie with tofu whipped cream. I'm not one to mock anyone's dietary restrictions, especially since I have my own, but nothing about vegan pumpkin pie with tofu whipped cream sounds right to me. The good news is that the Cakery makes pies that will never harm anyone. The even better news is that I could not taste a crumb of it.

This was the best Thanksgiving in a long time. Barcelona was a wonderful experience, and the people at Flaherty's could not have been nicer, but Thanksgiving is all about family to me. There's no place like home for the holidays. I think I heard that in a song somewhere. Best of all, when you host dinner in your apartment, you don't have to go anywhere afterward.

Gee, the traffic is terrific.