This is the first Thanksgiving that I will not be spending with my family. As I prepare to host my own dinner with friends, I think about the evolution of the Thanksgiving feast in the Fung clan. When I was little, we primarily had Chinese food. Because nobody liked turkey or knew how to cook it, we had roast duck instead. Instead of potatoes, my mom would make her sticky rice dish, not unlike the kind you get at dim sum, with sausage, chicken, mushrooms, shrimp, and scallops. Veggies would be the usual bok choy or similar leafy green. Or, we would do the Chinese New Year veggie plate, with cabbage, mushroom, and glass noodles. Yams would be dessert, but cooked in a sweet broth.
As my cousins and I grew a bit older, we wanted to emulate the meals we learned about at school and on television. Some of the Chinese dishes remained, but we introduced turkey into the meal. I recall the first few were dry. There may have been attempts to season it with soy sauce. It didn't occur to us that cranberry sauce could be made from scratch, so we always got the canned stuff (which to this day I still have a soft spot for). We made green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup and onion crisps on top. My Caucasian friends have affectionately told me that we celebrated a hybrid Chinese and "white trash" Thanksgiving.
Now that my cousins and I are the adults who plan the meals, our Thanksgivings do primarily consist of white people food, but done much better. It helps that one of my cousins is a graduate of culinary school. Last year, we spent Thanksgiving in Texas with one branch of the family who likes to deep fry their turkey. This blew our minds, as it may have been the first time we actually liked eating the turkey. Somehow, this led to us doing an entirely southern style Thanksgiving, with collard greens, corn bread, and mac-n-cheese. I wonder what the gang has planned this year.
One thing that has always remained constant regardless of how we've changed the Thanksgiving meal is my mom's sticky rice. That has become our tradition. So this year, I'm attempting to make it on my own for the first time. My mom was very encouraging and talked me through the steps over the phone. Though in her usual fashion, she had to say, "But don't serve it to your friends if you mess it up."
