10/10/10

Yesterday was Canadian Thanksgiving. Last year when Steve and I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving together, I asked him how Canadian Thanksgiving is different from American Thanksgiving and he explained to me that Thanksgiving is exactly the same in Canada as it is in America except that in Canada pilgrims and football are excluded from the holiday.

This year we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving with Steve's parents, a Scot, and our Canadian friend Becky. Becky's parents are from Yorkshire, so her Thanksgivings always include Yorkshire puddings, one of the best pieces of performance food art in existence.

For the information of the uninitiated, Yorkshire puddings are made by heating butter in muffin tins and then pouring a thin batter on top of the butter. It is a tricky, two-person operation.


The puddings are left for 15-20 minutes in a very hot oven. It is essential that the oven door is not opened during this process. It is also essential that at some point someone should say, "Let's check on the puddings," and that in response someone else should yell, "Don't open the oven door!" This makes the pudding rise up nice and high. When the oven door is finally opened, the puddings will have popped up over the rims of the tins, ready to be gobbled up.


The Yorkshire puddings accompany traditional turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and vegetables. Those are the red potatoes from our allotment at the back of my plate.


I made butternut squash pie for dessert. I'd never tried it before, but I now prefer it to pumpkin. Please note that I had nothing to do with the grainy, unwhipped but perfectly fine-tasting cream on top of my pie in this unattractively-photographed picture.


Only six weeks 'til American Thanksgiving.