A Piece of Pie

Having gone over the history of Thanksgiving yesterday, now seems like a good time to cover some of the aspects of my own first Thanksgiving (and also now that i have recovered from all that eating!). My lab here is quite international as i have probably mentioned in the past and, consequently, there are a number of us who don't celebrate Thanksgiving in our home countries and, also, have no place to celebrate it here. Enter the lab manager, Charlene, who very kindly invited us to her house (and there was, i think, a dozen of us who wnet - so this was exceedingly generous of her) for a traditional Southern Thanskgiving. In addition to the turkey (we had ham as well), there was mac and cheese, mashed potato, mashed sweet potato, homeade cranberry, cornmeal (or is it cornbread?) dressing, asparagus, green beans and onions, and apple sour (a cold salad style dish with apples - nice and zingy!). Dessert was pumpkin pie (absolutely delicious, i must say!) and apple pie, as well as some Hummingbird cake that we had bought along (like carrot cake except with bananas and other fruit). All very nice indeed.

Of course, as you can imagine, after eating this and more (there were nibbles provided too), we were all pretty stuffed - and had decided to go for a walk between the two courses. This took us along to the river and ponds near Charlene's house where some alligators live (although we didn't see them alas - i was quite excited at the prospect i have to say!). We also went round to where considerable amounts of bamboo grow - and this stuff ranged from the relatively new (thin and possibly easy to snap if you so wished) to the type of stuff that you could hack down and build a raft out of - as thick as your wrist! All in all, the day was very pleasant indeed - and i very much enjoyed my first Thanksgiving. Now where did i put that pumpkin pie?