tales of turkeys and underbaked pies

when you last heard from me, i was getting ready for a bake-off extravaganza with our borrowed convection oven. (the irony of this wasn't fully appreciated until rob said in an email yesterday, "How can the Koreans live without ovens??? That's insane. Even funnier that you 'borrowed an oven' to bake. Who borrows an oven? The very concept is so out there. " indeed. so very out there.)

well, we managed to get a good night of baking in. made some banana muffins, two batches of brownies and two or three pans of lemon squares. overall, a very successful evening. and tons of fun with priya, joy and jim. we even had a moment of telling each other what we are thankful for. how very...thanksgiving.

i got home Friday night, ready to bake it up again. Made some awesome pie crusts and got ready to preheat our little white stallion for an apple pie and persimmon tart. and, ah, korea, you never disappoint. the oven would not turn on. it was broken. fully broken. we plugged it in a bunch of times, and finally realized that it was, in fact, broken. i had a bit of a breakdown about it. that feeling of, oh my, i think i broke the oven. obviously i didn't break it, but i was the last one to touch it, and then i thought, oh my, i don't have $300 to replace the oven. and we've got to bake a turkey, and on and on. a little spun out, yes. working on it.

so, we called the owner of the oven, and plans were made to deal with it tomorrow. saturday comes. and we get the word that the place where he bought the oven will a) not refund the money; b) not give him a replacement; and c) not give him store credit until a repairman comes out to the house to check it out and confirms that it must be replaced. and we can't bring it to the store. the guy has to come out and look at it. and he'll come at 3:00.

right, so in the meantime, i decide that i'm going to buy an oven. i'll split it a few ways with some people, but we've got a 13 lb turkey in the fridge and we've got to do something with it. so, priya and i go out shopping for ovens. but alas, we are thwarted at every turn. you see, in korea, appliances are ridiculously expensive. the oven our friend bought was about $250, but everything else we saw ran anywhere from $400-$900. silly. and SMALL. super small. and the fridges are the same way. you really can't find anything that's less that $500. and everything is super fancy. it seems to me that most of the korean experience is about show and presentation. so everything is always really fancy. there doesn't seem to be a basic model of really anything. so, alas, the trip to find an oven was a bust.

the repair guy showed up early and determined after much confusion that the LCD screen on the face of the oven was broken and could be fixed on Tuesday. After a few back and forth phone conversations with the store representative, we figured out that our other option was to buy a different oven for about $90 more. So, we went for it. And Jim disappeared for about 2 hours trying to get the new oven. They tried to take off the face of other models to try to replace the part on ours. And finally, after all was said and done, we got the new oven. Slightly smaller and black. I named it Black Sabbath, seeing at we were cooking on Saturday, and all.

oven. Jim rocked it. He was a star with the basting and the checking and the cooking and the constant vigilance. He really made it happen. Even spilled a considerable amount of turkey grease all over himself while carving it up. We got the turkey in the oven with a little creative maneuvering. The top of the turkey just about hit the top of the oven. We ended up burning the hell out of the top side of the turkey, but after changing some settings, we worked it out. Cooking a 13 lb turkey in a 35 gallon convectionWe tried to bake a pie and an apple crisp, but the oven was a little wonky again, so i burned the hell out of the top of the persimmon pie and never actually cooked the crust -- a sad realization when we tried to cut into it at the party later. very sad.

while we were cooking the turkey, a friend from the states called us to say that she had just arrived in Gwangju. She had moved to Korea five days earlier to a town called Cheonju to the north of us. She made it down to our place for our Thanksgiving feast, and it was awesome. Bad Kitty (Lisa) is her name. She moved from Oakland. She's fabulous. It was so refreshing to have a new face around, and it was a great boost to my emotional experience. I had been having a really hard day, missing home, feeling frustrated with Korea, and chatting with her was really wonderful. She's definitely a kindred spirit in her love for all the same kinds of things that I dig --women's health, sex education, etc. etc. etc. I'm glad we got the chance to meet her (thanks Curtis, Christine, Steve and Juicy!).

The dinner went off quite well. tons of food. good company. funny you tube videos of japanese practical joke shows. excellent thanksgiving all around. definitely a 100% Korean Thanksgiving, folks.