The Friday before Thanksgiving was my first payday in Japan, so I decided to attempt a Thanksgiving dinner on my own. This my first attempt at cooking bulk Western food while in Japan, with its unique challenges, such as expensive meat, cooking materials that I can’t always read, and difficulty finding American staples. In addition, being Japan, the only cooking appliance I have access to is a two-burner stovetop – Japanese kitchens seem to not come equipped with ovens naturally, and I haven’t bought so much as a rice cooker or microwave yet. With this in mind, I decided that making my own Thanksgiving dinner in this environment was a worthy intellectual challenge.
Right away, I figured I probably wasn’t having a whole bird or a turkey. Still, since the oven seems to be a staple of Thanksgiving cooking, I consulted the best source for making up stuff as I go along – Google. I found some sites that had suggestions for crockpot cooking, and I ultimately decided on variations of recipes from this post because of the sheer number of recipes offered.
I was pleasantly surprised to find boneless chicken breasts for a decent price – around 500 yen for about 2 lbs. I slow cooked the chicken breasts layered in stuffing in a giant wok I picked up in a 100 yen shop for about 500 yen while I cooked the rest of the dishes. The stuffing was improvised with substitutions such as croutons for toasted bread pieces (yeah, they’re about the same, but it felt sketchy) and the mixture was cooked in yuzu wine. I may have used a little too much yuzu-chu, because yuzu is a pretty strong flavor, and everything tasted citrusy. I let this cook for a couple of hours, which was apparently too long, because afterwards the bottom of the pot had charred food stuck to it.
As the chicken/stuffing cooked, I made the rest of the side dishes. I made deviled eggs with some wasabi snuck into the usual deviled egg stuffing. I made mashed potatoes and used the extra sauce from the chicken as gravy. I also cooked some eggplant and onions. (Yes, there are both bulb onions and scallions in there. I had extras.) There was also a recipe for hot chocolate for which I used milk, hot chocolate mix, sugar, and some vanilla extract.
It was surprisingly good, with the exception of the mashed potatoes, which were kinda bland. The hot chocolate, vegetables, and deviled eggs were especially tasty. The chicken didn’t dry out with future servings, which was nice, but the yuzu was a little strong and could have probably been diluted more for the sake of people who don’t like the taste of yuzu (I was starting to get sick of it by the end of the week, myself).
My Thanksgiving meal (celebrated the Sunday before Thanksgiving):
Once the starches ran out, I started eating chicken and stuffing over white rice. Good times.
In hindsight, I wish I would have invited some tkd people over for Thanksgiving (or, more likely, crashed someone else’s place with food; the dorm isn’t the best place to entertain others), but at the same time, the challenge of making this dinner was fun enough so that I don’t regret it too much.
Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

