Thanksgiving

The past week, with the clock ticking until I leave Oxford possibly for good, I've gotten myself out and about a bit more. I love biking over to Keble around 12:30, scoffing at the freshers queuing for crappy fatty food at the dining hall, and dodging through the narrow paths around the pub to pick up a chicken sub and one or usually two Cokes to take home from the cafe. I figure UGA is probably earning money from all the crappy dining hall food I paid for but have never cashed in on, so I'll go to the "prohibitively expensive" cafe every day until I leave. :P I also have gotten back out to the grocery store to indulge my good and bad habits for buying too much delicious-looking food on an empty stomach. Mid-morning is a good time, time to get crumpets or welsh cakes (these delicious scone-shaped but flatter and moister cakes with black currants and nutmeg) before they sell out but also to get through the U-Scan lines before all the children have their lunch break and pour into M&S to run around and scream or mope in their school uniforms. My particular vice in Oxford has been juice--they make so many great ones here, like tangerine juice (the grown-up's orange juice), and generally they don't add sugar or water to it so it's nice and fresh and full of vitamins. Dr. Eberle had to stage an intervention, though, because when she was reorganizing the refrigerator to make room for Thanksgiving supplies she noticed six half-full cartons juice with my name scrawled on them. My name is Lauren Elmore, and I have a drinking problem. Mainly fruit juice.

A more community-friendly result of my market-prowling was my world-famous carrot cake! (World-famous because I've told friends in France and now England about how fabulous it is.) Dad had scanned Mom's recipe into an e-mail for me near the beginning of term, but I had waffled about actually baking one for so long because, baffled by degrees Celsius and measurements in grams, I was worried I'd bake something horribly burned or salty or something and no one would believe my stories about life-changing pastry. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I got into the kitchen Tuesday night and peeled and shredded and blended and sifted to my (and Julianna's) heart's content, watching the cakes in the 180 degree oven like a hawk until I had to run to dinner and fretting like a mother away from her children all through another of Keble's culinary catastrophes (they actually figured out how to mess up potatoes). Once I got home, I had a small army waiting for me to frost the cakes in the clammy, cinnamony kitchen, and I think their anticipation paid off. The cakes looked and tasted just like normal, the only flaw being slightly runny frosting ("icing sugar" is a little different than powdered sugar, I think), but even then its sliding out from between the two layers gave the sides a pretty, drizzled look. I bought way too many carrots, though, having no conception of how many carrots make three cups of shredded carrots, so I'm making carrot cake 2.0 in the next day or so, as well as a salad with 12 more carrots chopped on top.

Wednesday evening we had our dons party, or, as I'd like to think of it, a university-sponsored indulgence in alcohol with our tutors cautioned to attend. :P No, funny as it was for our student fees to be applied to 48 bottles of wine, the affair was very classy and a very fun group of most of the students and their tutors broke the "no liquids in the library" rule as politely as possible. I spent the first hour of the party in the kitchen, shifting 10 batches of pre-made hors d'oeuvres in and out of the oven and onto platters--no one else had immediately stepped in to manage the kitchen, and I had the double motivation of having a foodie family background and of feeling at first a bit awkward to get out and mingle with other people's nicely dressed tutors. Eventually (after several "vols au vent" and Belgian truffles) I made my way into the stuffy library and found things pretty fun. Carly picked up a gin and tonic for me, from resident bartenders Will and Tony, and I enjoyed chatting with Mrs. Bradshaw and her husband (Dr. Bradshaw of UGA at Oxford fame--it's good that he knows of me by reputation as a good maker of carrot cake, because I'd be too nervous to say anything smart to probably the world's premier Virginia Woolf scholar). As the night wore on, several of us raided the mini-fridge--me characteristically stealing a box of orange juice and drinking it without a glass--and lounged in the armchairs thrown around the library to chat and scare passing children (OK, not everyone on that last one--Matt Williamson scared Leila from across the garden when he walked by the window with a Venetian mask on, but all was well when she saw that it was just the guy who yells at the football games). :P

Continued, 25 November 10:15 p.m.-- I woke up on Thursday morning feeling like I do every Thanksgiving--I just wanted to shlepp around in my PJs, watch football, eat lots of food, and pass out. Thankfully, we had all planned ahead to do just that. Several of the guys had hooked up a computer to the television to watch NFL games all day, so the small furor of boys crunching potato chips and occasionally screaming at the television comforted/distracted me while I finished up a history essay/gabbed at my friends in the library down the hall. By about 6 good smells were wafting out of the kitchen, and by 6:10 everyone who wasn't cooking was banned from the kitchen until dinner, so we all clustered around the ground floor, most of us in festive-colored sweaters, to collectively grumble about being hangry and three (THREE!) false alarms about it being dinnertime. Eventually we made a line about as big as any Elmore Thanksgiving line that wrapped around the kitchen island and its plate upon plate of mostly homemade food. Dr. Eberle made some great herbed stuffing (she was worried about having added tablespoons instead of teaspoons of herbs, since we don't have measuring spoons and just use actual coffee and soup spoons for baking, but I thought it tasted great!), Gabriel made scalloped potatoes with gruyere and creme fraiche that I seriously ran back for seconds of, and some of the second floor kids made four adorably homemade pies that were surprisingly tasty. Weird as it would seem, it was pretty much like a family Thanksgiving as we all sat down around the dining room table. Some people got nostalgic as the night wore on, and even though I entertained the group by telling the one family Thanksgiving tradition I could think of (my mom "dancing" with the turkey as she cleans it in the sink--seriously, I thought everyone did this) I never felt sad to be away from home on Thanksgiving. My family was still there, and I called them the day before and a few days later for their bigger family gathering during the UGA-GT game, and how could I be sad to be in Oxford?