One Night In Shanghai

All of Shanghai was abuzz last Thursday with the arrival of the Most Inexplicably Famous Person in America, Paris Hilton. Apparently in town for an MTV event, Paris shunned her family's own Shanghai Hilton for the newer, recently opened Grand Hyatt on the Bund.

















In any event, Tiffany and I were too busy with our own big party -- Thanksgiving at our house! We hosted my Credit Suisse colleagues as well as Tiff's Shanghai Centre co-workers, about 15 people in all, to celebrate and give thanks. Most of our guests were native Chinese and were excited to be celebrating their first Thanksgiving.

















One of Tiffany's coworkers brought her 5 year old daughter, Yao Yao, who provided much of the entertainment for the evening. The turkeys arrived in an insulated styrofoam carrying case, and little Yao Yao was curious and scared that when I opened the case, the turkey would fly out and start sqwuaking! You can see her cowering behind her mom in the picture. She soon learned it was a little too late for the poor turkeys. Yao Yao also discovered a love for corn. After polishing off her plate, we caught her later shoveling corn directly from the serving bowl on the food table into her mouth! Luckily everyone else had already served themselves corn.


Tiffany took the opportunity to work on her cooking skills and spent Wednesday and Thursday cooking up a feast. We found an American diner to order in the turkeys (we ordered two, 14-pound birds), sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes, but Tiffany whipped up homemade cranberry dressing, corn bread, herb vegetables, brown-sugar honey coated carrots and a honey-lime-ginger coated fruit salad. She also cleaned out some leftover foods from my cousin Josh and our friend Meredith, by preparing the corn, carmel yams, baked beans and a vegetable curry that we inherited from them.



We gave thanks for something that is rare in China, our kitchen oven. Not a common item in Chinese households, we are the only people from both our works to have an oven in their home! Amazing how the Chinese make do with steamers and a few stovetop burners. But we wanted to show them what they were missing.


Tiffany bought two large cans of pumpkin pie filling and found a recipe for homemade crust using olive oil. The recipe for the pie was somewhat generous, and she ended up baking eight pumpkin pies! She also baked a blueberry and peach crumble. My contribution was my world-famous homemade cookies (I am generously assuming that if people have eaten them in both the US and China that they are now "world famous" :) I baked an assortment using chocolate chips, oatmeal, dried cranberries and macadamia nuts.

I think it is safe to say that we have now left an American footprint on the waistlines of China!





Everyone had a great dinner - most of them were tasting these traditional Thanksgiving dishes for the first time. And we explained in the other Thanksgiving tradition, everyone had to take home leftovers. Some people we even convinced to take entire pies. All in all it was a huge success.

We'd like to wish all of our family, friends and blog readers a Happy Thanksgiving!!!