Thanksgiving Murakami Musical Rehearsal (Sunday, November 30, 2008)

Finally, the time has come for a musical event to be held in MY town.  No need to pack for the weekend, get up early and go to a faraway part of the prefecture, or impose on another person’s place for the night.  This weekend was in our house!!

Coincidentally, this musical practice fell on the weekend of Thanksgiving.  Lucky for us Americans, it’s become a musical tradition to have a Thanksgiving feast.  We rented cooking and eating rooms, all brought our own dishes, and ate until we dropped!!  Along with the traditional TURKEY, salad, gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole, vegetable and cheese casserole, potatoes and vegetables, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, apple and pumpkin pie, cake, and cookies (which were ALL delicious), Daphanie made a Singaporean soup, Richie cooked meat wraps, Natasha baked a South African Milk Tart, and Taeko brought billions of kaki. 

Funny story about my sweet potatoes: this really should come as no surprise to family and close friends, but I messed up!!  You see, what happened was I was ridiculously busy as usual all week, and bought the satsumaimo (sweet potatoes) in advance on Thursday.  On Saturday morning, I woke up early to prepare them before rehearsal.  When I cut the ends off, I noticed something terribly wrong.  They were purple!?!?!!  The grocery stores and vegetable stands wouldn’t open until it was too late, so I decided to just go about baking them, mashing and adding milk, butter, salt and pepper.  To my surprise, they were sweet and yummy BUT the most brilliant color of purple I’ve ever seen in a food!!  I can’t read kanji very well, so I guess I just skipped over the ‘murakaki’ (purple) at the grocery store – woops!!