Thanksgiving 2009

This is a photo of the chicken I cooked tonight, posing with Charlie, the inflatable turkey my parents mailed me a week or so ago. For scale, that inflatable turkey is 16" long.

So, in the absence of a (real) turkey (and really the absence of ambition to make a turkey), I decided to roast a chicken, which I'd never done before. By the time I got my plans for roasting a chicken together, it was already 6 p.m. and I was beginning to get hungry, so I decided to just put some olive oil and rosemary and garlic under its skin and go with that.

For some reason, it always looked really easy to do this kind of thing when I was watching my mother do it. What I didn't take into account is that chickens have skin that doesn't float freely over their muscles. I'm not really sure how I even thought that was possible -- maybe I just always missed the part where my mother must have spent several awkward minutes pulling the skin loose and listening to the fascia tear. I'm reasonably sure it's not because chickens come with the skins magically pre-loosened in the US.

Those of you who know about my squidginess in the raw meat department might wonder at how I even managed to accomplish things. I can tell you I'm pretty proud of the feat. The roasting went without a hitch, despite my lack of experience.

I also cooked the noodles I made last night, in the absence of both chicken broth and corn starch. I used these crazy gel-conglomerates of chicken-broth-like something or other to make the broth. It's kind of like a gelatinous bouillon cube. I didn't replace the corn starch -- it didn't seem relevant.

And, to attempt to stave off the monochromatic-ness and vitamin-deficient-ness of the meal, I cooked some carrots with honey and butter and rosemary. It should be noted that, since I bought it today, rosemary is actually the only spice we have on hand. I wouldn't say this limited my creativity so much as my lack of creativity limits my creativity on a daily basis, so no harm no foul.

It should also be noted that I spared you any kind of "fowl" put just now. Oh, wait. Below, a photo of me cooking with Charlie.

Anyway, this morning Alex and I took another stab at going to OFII, where a nice lady who spoke sufficiently slowly to understand on the first try told us we had to mail the form we were given in Houson -- but don't worry, it's not serious that you lost the original or wrote notes in the margins of the copy you do have -- along with photocopies of a few pages of our passports to their office. Regardless of the fact that we were standing in the office. They had to be sent registered mail. And no, it's porbably not "serious-serious" that your 3 months is up tomorrow and who knows how long it'll take the post to deliver this registered mail three blocks. I'm not sure if "it's probably not serious-serious" made me feel any better, really, but it's done. Her casualness might indicate that I probably won't be deported. However, the one thing that was buoying my "not a big deal" attitude was that the penalty for not completing this task was "to be considered as having an irregular status". The poster in the waiting room of the OFII, though, said something to the effect of "So you're a foreigner with an irregular status? Leaving now, by choice, will allow you to keep your dignity -- and receive help on how to return to your country of origin!" Definitely not comforting.

That's about it for the adventures of the day. Progress on my projects -- and motivation! -- remains elusive.