A Lady in London

I didn’t want to come home for Thanksgiving. For the past five years I have gotten used to being away. From St. Petersburg to London, I have enjoyed carefree Thanksgiving dinners and have largely avoided cooking. But this year my mother’s attempts to guilt trip me into coming home to Silicon Valley finally worked. I packed my bags and got ready for a California Thanksgiving with the family.

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Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I love getting together with fellow Americans to be thankful and eat heaping portions of autumn food. It’s pretty simple, and it’s always good. So good, in fact, that this year instead of going to just one Thanksgiving dinner, I went to four.

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This week it was time to celebrate my third expat Thanksgiving. Last Thanksgiving I cheated my way out of cooking dinner by ordering food from my favorite local grocer, Rosslyn Deli. In lieu of attempting to shove a huge turkey into my tiny oven and trying to cook stuffing while lacking any culinary skills whatsoever, I left the dinner to the experts and gave thanks for being able to shirk out of my cooking responsibilities.

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Last year I spent Thanksgiving in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where my Thanksgiving dinner consisted of a vodka shot followed by a giant bowl of borscht. It was good borscht, but it just didn’t seem right to be eating Russian food for American Thanksgiving.

This year my family was visiting me in London and I was determined to have an authentic Thanksgiving dinner complete with a giant turkey. However, there was one small problem: the postage-stamp sized oven in my flat. No turkey—however small—would ever fit in there.

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