Thanksgiving

... or عيد الشكر...

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays.  I mean, it involves a ton of really awesome food (pumpkin pie, need I say more?), being around family and friends, a long weekend off from school.... Thanksgiving also tends to be very different each year in my family, so it's always fun to think about how to out-do the previous year.  Last year, it was the invasion of the Brits.  My uncle (on my mum's side) was there, as well as one of my closest friends, Anna Lisa, and two other girls from Scotland who were all studying abroad in Georgia, and another good friend, Maya, who was in choir with me in Jordan.  Anna Lisa wrote a great post about it.

This year, it was shaping up to be very different.  My younger sister wasn't going to be there.  Until the week before, we thought it would be just 5 of us.  But then it changed a bit - I invited my Arabic professor, who brought her friend from Egypt with her, and my mum invited some colleagues from work, who were from Saudi Arabia.  By the time Thanksgiving day rolled around, it looked like there would be a lot of Arabic heard around the house.  I was pretty excited about it.

The real adventure though was in the cooking.  We had roughly 17 dishes that were prepared, some I didn't even know about until we were cleaning up...  I was in charge of 6 dishes, which probably won't happen again.  It was kind of crazy.  But the food was delicious!  We deep fried the turkey - it was perfect this time - and made some traditional dishes, like green bean casserole, sweet potatoes (with marshmallows of course), stuffing, and pumpkin pie.  Then we had had some more interesting dishes, like jalapeno poppers, whiskey-glazed carrots, potato and carrot cake, roasted parsnips, apple dumplings, lemon creme pie, pumpkin creme roll, tabbouleh  and grape and rosemary calzones.  Of course, I insisted on a number of Pioneer Woman recipes. I love her stuff.  Our guests brought some traditional Arab sweets and Arab coffee.

We only had maybe two major hiccups.  The first was around 11am, when I put the pumpkin pie into the oven.  After about 15 minutes, the oven decided it didn't want to play nice anymore, freaked out, and shut down.  So we fired up the grill outside to finish cooking the pie, but when we went to take it out of the oven, it locked.  My dad spent a few minutes trying to jail-break my pie, and eventually got it free.  It finished cooking just fine in the grill.  We gave the oven a few hours of time-out, and then it worked just fine for the rest of the day.  I was glad we weren't trying to cook the turkey in the oven.  The second snafu was a total blonde moment on my part.  I took the sweet potatoes out of the oven to check them, forgot that the glass top of the casserole dish had been in the oven for 40 minutes, and picked it up with my bare hand.  Yeah, it burned my thumb and three fingers.  I also may have thrown it across the kitchen when I realized I was getting burnt.  But it was very well made and didn't break.  Other than that, everything went smoothly!  The only thing that I'm sad about is that we forgot to get a group picture... We were having too much fun to think about it.  So, here are the few pictures I do have:

making the pumpkin desserts with my mamma

locked in!

jail-breaking the pie

turkey's done! 

...beautifully done!

pulling out the fine china 

what was left of the spread once I remembered to take pictures

Pioneer Woman's apple dumplings.

lemon creme pie

pumpkin creme roll

traditional Arab sweets

and pumpkin pie, of course!  

Uwharrie National Forest

A few weeks ago, I took a day off of school and work so Jeff and I could go camping.  We went to Uwharrie National Forest, which is about 2 hours from home.  The weather was beautiful - cool enough that we weren't sweating from packing in all of our stuff, but warm enough that we weren't freezing either.  As the sun was setting, we thought we had found the perfect campsite, with rock remains (from a cabin maybe?) that would make a great fire pit, flat areas for the tent, and it was on high ground, so we could see a lot around us.  Unfortunately, after several trips up and down steep hills, we couldn't find any water, so we decided to pick up our gear and hike back to the last place we saw water.  It turned out to be a really nice spot - it had a fire pit already made and lots of wood around to burn.  As for water, we got to really test out Jeff's filter, since there were only pools of stagnant water nearby.  The temperature got down to 31 during the night, but we stayed pretty warm, except for our toes.  It was a nice, quiet weekend for us.  We didn't really run into other people until we hiked out the next day, so it felt like we pretty much had the forest to ourselves.

setting up the campsite

our water source

After Thanksgiving, Jeff and I went back to Uwharrie and met up with a good friend of ours from Jordan (although now living in the States).  We went to a different trail this time, hiked for about half an hour, and then found a nice spot away from the trail to set up camp.  It was still pretty early on, so we set up the tents, gathered lots of firewood (we were expecting temperatures around 35 that night), and then spent about an hour and a half exploring other parts of the trail.  Then we came back, ate some, started a nice, big fire, roasted hot dogs for dinner, s'mores for dessert, and finished it off with hot chocolate.  Around 10 we bundled up and went to bed.  It ended up getting down to 33, although it felt a lot colder with the wind chill.  After the sun came up, Jeff got back to work on the fire, and we had oatmeal and more s'mores for breakfast with our coffee/hot chocolate.  It was a really nice, lazy morning of eating, stoking the fire, and hanging out.  We had bought some freeze-dried meals from REI for lunch (beef stroganoff, sweet corn and green beans), and after we finished eating we packed everything up and hiked back out.  We really enjoyed Uwharrie both times, and hopefully once the weather gets a little warmer again we'll go back and try some of the longer trails.

our food tree - trying to save the hot dogs from the raccoons

Joanna dropped her roll of toilet paper in the stream, and it took about half an hour to finally dry out and burn

roasting hot dogs

s'mores!!!

Joanna got water duty...

...but Jeff helped her out of the stream

the "stump stove," but really it was Jeff's favorite seat and cooking  surface

our campsite

Pumpkin Muffins

Ok, so I'm slightly completely obsessed with pumpkin.  I love it.  It's one of the best things about fall, there's pumpkin everything.  Today, my last class before Thanksgiving break was cancelled, so of course, I came home and decided I wanted some pumpkin muffins.  Totally normal.  Here's the original link: Easy Pumpkin Muffins

But I wasn't quite satisfied with what I read.  So here's what I actually did:

1 c. granulated sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 cup canola oil
3 eggs
1 1/2 c. all-purpose flour
1 lb can of pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. vanilla
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4-1/2 tsp. ground cloves (I roughly guestimated...)

Preheat oven to 375 F.  Put all the ingredients into the super cool apple-green Kitchen-Aid mixer (a.k.a. my favorite kitchen appliance ever) and mix well.  Grease the muffin tin, fill about half way with batter.  Bake for roughly 15.  Try not to inhale them all the moment they come out of the oven.

I iced them with this cinnamon icing that I got in some random cookie mix, and I have no idea how to make it.  But I will find out.  Because it is PERFECT with these muffins.

...and now I'm going to go eat another one.