Thanksgiving Wrap-Up

The morning was pretty chill, mostly just hanging out at my brother's house, enjoying the sunshine out on his front porch, and eating the black bean chorizo soup he had made the day before over some of the leftover rice. (Did I mention that we'd made a lot of that stuff?)

Finally at about 4 PM, it was time for my parents to head home, and so they drove my down to my cousin's house in Boston. That way I could work from my cousin's house during the day, and then easily make it to the airport on my own in the evening.

My mother had sent my cousin home the night before with what she described as "pie in a bag", which turned out to be exactly that. Not only was there canned pumpkin and a rolled up pie crust, but there was also a plastic baggie of all the spices pre-mixed, and two eggs carefully wrapped in paper towels so they wouldn't break. Hence, with all the ingredients at our disposal, we made another pie, and sat down to dinner while it baked. My uncle had sent my cousin home with some leftover rice, turkey, and mashed potatoes, so it was Thanksgiving leftovers AGAIN, but would you believe they were still as delicious as ever? Thank goodness there were limited quantities, or I'm sure I would have eaten far too much again!

Then when we turned our attention to dessert, we realised we had a problem: We had heavy cream that could be turned into whipped cream, but my cousin didn't have a mixer, nor even a whisk. We tried beating it for ages with a fork, but it was really going nowhere, just producing a few bubbles in the cream.

Then we had an inspired idea: Apparently in the olden days, people used to make butter (a later stage of whipped cream) in butter urns. And when they didn't want to spend a lot of time actively churning the butter, they would tie a butter urn to their rocking chair, and just make butter by rocking back and forth in a chair. Hence, we logically concluded, if we were to put the heavy cream into a sealed container and shake it a lot, it would eventually turn into whipped cream.

We pulled out a tupperware container, poured the cream into it, sealed it up tightly, and started shaking. It was amazing actually how quickly we realised we suddenly weren't hearing the sound of sloshing cream anymore as we shook it. Opened it up, and there was some absolutely delicious looking whipped cream! We were geniuses!! (That's my cousin in the photo above, shaking the tupperware full of cream).

My cousin's flatmate then came home, and so we all sat around one of our computers watching episodes of "The Office" on Hulu.com (so nice to be back in the US where one can watch Hulu!), eating pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Delicious as ever!!