enter the haggis

Happy Burns Night! Though it has been pointed out to me by a number of native Scots, Scotland doesn't really do holidays. Well, I mean, they do, they don't feel remotely obligated to celebrate anything ever. Scotland is a really apathetic place, unless it is something about being "English", in which case they get VERY nationalistic about not being English. As a result I just sort of figured that everyone would get VERY excited about today being birthday of their almost-patron saint, poet Robert Burns. (They did not, in true form.) Today is one of those would-be big holidays that people supposedly do things for, but they're not required.

What do people do to celebrate a poet, you ask?

They hold Burns Suppers which are formal dinners with a bunch of thoroughly absurd traditions, including an entire speech devoted to addressing the haggis, ceremonial slicings of the haggis itself, toasts to assorted members of the table and bagpipe interludes. I guess when you are drinking your weight in whisky this seems reasonable. From wikipedia, this is the order of a traditional Burns supper (click for links):

• Start of the evening
• Host's welcoming speech
• Entrance of the haggis
• Supper
• Immortal memory
• Appreciation
• Toast to the Lassies
• Reply to the Toast to the Lassies
• Other toasts and speeches
• Works by Burns
• Closing

I couldn't find any big public Burns parties - I think it's sort of like a traditional Thanksgiving celebration; it takes place at home. But that didn't stop me from having a Burns supper! A bunch of my international friends and I got together at a local, traditional Scottish pub to celebrate with haggis neeps & tatties and whisky. We didn't have to address any inanimate objects and we got to eat a lot of haggis (which is actually delicious). So maybe we sort of missed the excitement of the night (there were no never-ending toasts, replies, etc), but it was still nice.

And there was a lot of whisky...so we must have done something right.

life during wartime

I got some groceries, some peanut butter to last a couple of days

little cream soda

submitted without commentary: signs in Tesco

happy thanksgiving!

In solidarity, today I am eating a turkey sandwich for lunch (& looking fairly demonic, sorry about that).

Tonight I am going to a seminar over at Glasgow Uni and then I am going to my second Thanksgiving dinner with some international friends; I'm very excited. Thanksgiving is something I think everyone can get behind when you present it as "eat a lot and drink a lot until you think you will explode, take a nap, AND THEN EAT MORE."

jive turkey

Happy Thanksgiving week, blogfolks! Continuing on the theme of my blog as a food blog...

I was worried that I was going to miss Thanksgiving and be sad about it, but this was not the case! Instead I am going to not one but two Thanksgiving parties. The first one is tonight, with the Scottish Lesbian Army & Friends. My international friends are having a Thanksgiving party on actual Thanksgiving, which is going to be a lot of fun - they really like the concept of getting everyone all together in one space.

On the whole the UK is very confused by Thanksgiving, which is adorable. They get the concept of it, but not much else. They don't really get the customs or the food you'd eat. But I have a bunch of friends who are also Americans, and we've been trying to explain it as "everyone gets together, gets dressed up, drinks a lot of wine, eats a fuckton of food, watches tv, takes a nap, and eats more". Everyone likes the idea of it, and we've told them to think of it sort of like Christmas, but with more food. Christmas is their big holiday, with turkeys and stuffing and whatnot. I had a "Christmas sandwich" yesterday, which was chicken, ham and stuffing. (And probably mayo.) Close, guys...

We have cranberry sauce here, but it usually comes in a small jar and is very expensive. Dried cranberries are pretty easy to come by, but nothing beats a good cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving, right? It took four stores in two different parts of town, but finally found some! LOOK AT THIS:


I bought three bags of them, had to go hunt down nutmeg, and ran home to get down to business. My flatmates thought I was NUTS. They watched me do it, deciding that I was in fact making cranberry jam. Not quite... All my friends (except for the Americans, they are clearly excited too) think cranberry sauce is "mental" and simply cannot wrap their minds around it. I hope they are ready...I just tasted it & it's delicious.

I feel it in my bones

It is November and I am freezing already. I have many more months of this, and I understand it is only going to get worse.

You would think that after 22 years of bitter New England winters I would be prepared for Scottish winters. I thought I would be! I'm a pretty hardy New Englander. Being cold doesn't really bother me - I am prone to opening windows in February in New Hampshire. In fact I don't think I ever thought to myself "holy HELL, it is cold." In New England, it's a really windy sort of cold - the temperature will drop really low and you can feel the cold on your skin.

Glasgow shares a latitude line with Moscow. Which, by the way, is in Russia. But I was assured that we get a "nice Gulf Stream warm-up" from being so close to the Atlantic. This was a lie. Every day I think "Holy HELL, it is cold." (On paper it doesn't sound terribly cold here - the temperature's been hovering around 45 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn't terrible. I would daresay that 45 is a pretty good temperature for the fall, especially this time of the fall.)

But it's not the same kind of cold. This whole country wears wool coats all the time, because it's the only way to keep warm(ish). By mid-October, I had to go out and buy a wool coat because my New England-Acceptable ski coat wasn't keeping me warm! It's not a windy sort of cold here - though we do have wind sometimes and then you just sort of want to die - it's more of a damp cold that seeps through your bones and into each individual muscle and you wonder if you will ever be warm again. Suddenly I understand the wool coat thing, they sort of act as insulation for your body.

In light of my blog slowly but surely becoming a food blog, this brings me back to soup. As you might know, I love soup. It's good for you and warms you up - what else can you ask for? Unfortunately, as I know all too well from my previous visit to the UK, the only sort of soup you can really get is Cream of Blank soup. Even straightforward things like minestrone soup is more like Cream of Minestrone soup. If you order chicken soup expecting chicken noodle soup you are going to be very disappointed, because you've actually got cream of chicken soup. Some cream of blank soups are delicious - cream of broccoli, for instance, is a magical thing. And then there are others that are just surprisingly lumpy in ways you don't want. (I imagine the Brits find American soups to be terribly weak.)

As a result of being cold all the time, I spend a lot of time around lunchtime thinking about how much I would like soup, but I would not like the cream form of it. (The last time I did this I got cream of lentil soup, which I would like to not eat ever again, thanks.) I would look around at the soup selections in the grocery stores, thinking, "This would be great if it was not going to be cream of blank." (I realize I could make soup myself, but that sounds difficult.) Imagine my surprise when I found pumpkin and coriander soup the other day!
yes, I do eat in my room rather than in the kitchen.

Pumpkin is not A Thing here - I saw a few of them for a hot second around Halloween, but they're not very popular, whereas you are all drowning in pumpkin flavored everythings. So naturally, this is all I have been eating for the past few days. Admittedly this is also a cream of pumpkin situation, but that is totally the correct way to do this. I am very pleased. All is right with the world again, or at least until they take this pumpkin soup out of the stores - it's a "limited release".