It was my turn to host Thanksgiving dinner this year.
Determined to impress my mother-in-law, I decided to incorporate an East meets West theme, a combination of Chinese and North American cuisine.
Of course, I’d never made steamed buns, pan fried chive pockets or shrimp fried rice with saffron, but hey, when has that ever stopped me?
I found some recipes online and tried them out on my husband in advance for “authenticity”. He helped me perfect them and I started to feel pretty confident about my plan.
That is, until a few days before Thanksgiving when I started to think through my prep. I quickly realized it was going to be an awful lot of finicky work to prepare the steamed buns and chive pockets while simultaneously preparing a number of other dishes…
So, I put all the recipes side by side and created an Excel spreadsheet of exactly what I needed to do and when in order to have dinner ready by 5 pm. It worked on paper… as long as nothing went wrong…
Despite a very stressful afternoon, it turned out quite well and dinner was only half an hour late.
But I’m not sure I want to tackle something quite that ambitious next year…
