Dim sum for Thanksgiving—not as unique as it sounds

It turns out that neither going to the Smithsonian nor going out for dim sum for Thanksgiving is such a unique idea after all.  The American History Museum was packed with families yesterday and we had to take a ticket and wait in line at the dim sum restaurant, which was still overflowing at 12:30 even though it seats 150 people.

I would love to make dim sum a new Thanksgiving tradition. Dim sum personifies my number-one reason for eating out: to eat things I cannot (or will not take the time to) make at home. (Perhaps I could master one or two of the dishes there, but the beauty of dim sum is the constantly changing variety). We ate sticky beef noodle crepes, taro root dumplings filled with mushrooms and a savory sauce, radish cakes (which don't taste like radishes at all, more like sticky rice and bacon), steamed buns with pork, shrimp dumplings, stuffed bean curd, and more. It was fun to get to select the little trays of food off the carts the Chinese ladies wheel around the tables.

There's one little problem: PE sat through most of the meal with her eyes moist, her lips puckered.  We thought she would like dim sum since she loves tofu (but only if bland and uncooked), rice and dumplings. And she has loved the idea of dim sum since reading Dim Sum for Everyone when she was in preschool. Alas, the food was just too exotic for her.  She wouldn't touch the sticky noodle crepe, which was really just a long steamed dumpling; she ate the steamed bun until she hit the center and found a slice of onion; and we had to keep the shrimp dishes on the other side of the table so she wouldn't have to smell them. The only thing she finally ate was the stuffed bean curd, whose center was like the center of a meat dumpling. She pulled off the bean curd skin and ate the inside.

It's hard to enjoy a meal when one of your fellow diners is unhappy and hungry.  And, though he ate a share of the food, TA was soon stuffed, leaving D and me to eat more radish cake than we wanted; we were too full for the steamed Chinese broccoli when it finally came around (our meal was missing a vegetable).

I'm not sure there is a lesson in any of this, if this means we'll have to crawl back to more traditional fare from now on, so that everyone will eat and be happy. Maybe we'll try again at Thanksgiving in a couple of years, when PE might not be so picky, or we should go there some other time, with more adventurous eaters as our dinner companions.

Thanksgiving dinner in a Chinese restaurant?

Despite what I said in my last post, how cooking Thanksgiving dinner usually gets me out of my post-summer cooking doldrums, a few days ago I decided that I really don't want to cook on Thanksgiving this year.

Though I've loved making Thanksgiving dinner in the past—mostly because I can't think of a better flavor combination than turkey-cranberry-pumpkin—I haven't be able to bring myself to buy a turkey or even a turkey breast at the grocery store this year, much less order an organic turkey from the local Amish market or natural foods store weeks in advance.

My hesitation became clear last week when I read the comic Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! in the Sunday comics. (See the whole comic at:  http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/uc/20081123/ltmrkt081123.gif ).

I already spend a portion of most evenings in the kitchen cooking dinner and another portion of the day cleaning the kitchen (I don't have the cleanest kitchen in the world, but I manage to get the dishes off the counters and loaded or washed by the end of the day). How can it be a true holiday if I am in the kitchen most of the day? And with just the four of us for Thanksgiving this year, it was hard to justify so much work for just four portions. Plus, I always find Thanksgiving pots and pans the worst to scrape and wash, taking longer than a normal day's wash.

So we are planning to head to the Smithsonian's newly reopened Museum of American History, then out for dim sum (if we can find it), or anything else that might be open. I am thinking this might be a new tradition for us, a thankful-to-be-liberated-from-the-kitchen day.

Still, if the weather turns out to be horrible, or I change my mind and become suddenly nostalgic for a more traditional Thanksgiving, there is a can of whole berry cranberry sauce and a small can of pumpkin in my cabinet, and part of a frozen chicken in the freezer, from which I could surely pull something together. Maybe I only need to know that I don't have to stay in the kitchen all day this Thursday before I can head back there with a spring in my step and a sense of freedom in my heart.