Flashback

During the four or five weeks of my slacking non-blogging era there was one particular event that deserves being recorded, although it is almost entirely unrelated to the land of Israel or the Bible. That event is Thanksgiving dinner.

Now, by Thanksgiving dinner I of course mean the true Thanksgiving dinner. You see, every Friday night our school did a Shabbath - Sabbath - dinner where everyone dressed up and we ate a nicer dinner than usual. Not wanting to make two of these dinners in a row, Thursday and Friday, they instead combined the two into one Friday night event, thereby transposing Thanksgiving to Friday night. Some of the more Southern students at JUC found this to be wholely unacceptable, though we couldn't balme the school since unfortunately the idea makes logical sense.

To remedy the problem we determined the only available course of action for us to follow was to hold our own Thanksgiving dinner on the real Thanksgiving night. The idea was planned by my fellow celtic/southern brother Matthew Semler and myself., with Ben joining us that night for the roast - insert manly grunt here. As could be expected there were a few minor difficulties we had to overcome; namely, we had no kitchen, food, or idea how to use either even if we had had them. Like I said, "minor difficulties..."

Our solution was as follows: there is a fire pit outside, it will work plenty for our kitchen; food could be purchased in the Old City, we just have to hope it won't be carrying some mortal bacteria; and it's Thanksgiving for goodness sake, it doesn't necessarily have to taste good, but we must have turkey! Our meal consisted of a turkey complete with head and innards donated from a generous family who lives on the school grounds, along with ten kilos of potatoes - ok, my arabic is only so good and sometimes things get slightly groggy in translation, give me a break - and a bagful unshucked corn on the cob, all of which was to be cooked over our fire. We felt terribly manly. - insert another manly grunt.

We drowned the turkey in a red wine mixture with spices that we concocted and buried the potatoes and corn in the coals. Here's how it turned out....

the cooks...

meet ochmed, your friendly jewish turkey

we became close friends

until Ben took a knife to him and we started the marinating process

Ok, so it was a bad idea to put something that big on the fire, but hey we're guys; what more could you expect?

Look at that beautiful dinner. You know you want some...

The cooks.... with the cooking utensils - a knife, a spatula, two saws, a hacket, and a backhoe

sadly, I'm telling the truth.

"Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination" ~Mark Twain

- well, if we have to choose one...