Celebrations & Giving Thanks

At O Shima Restaurant

For all the Canadians out there, today is the last of a long weekend, as it's the 'Canadian' thanksgiving - and the weekend has been beautiful! We've had a lovely amount of sunshine over the last week, so it was nice to be able to wear a dress to celebrate my birthday without shivering to death!

This weekend has been all about food, friends, family, and more food for me :) It was a lovely way to celebrate my birthday!

Except I didn't actually take a lot of food pictures AT my birthday dinner with my friends! I was too excited for a tonkatsu curry plate, I guess ;). This was the first time I'd ever had all my besties together at once (usually at least once schedule interferes) and it was a lot of fun. The restaurant was surprisingly good! I had booked it wanting to eat sushi, but they had quite an expansive menu (so in the end, only 2/9 of us got sushi, haha)

We did go for dessert afterwards though! This is my mini-trio of birthday cakes. I hate being sung to - especially in public - since I always get embarrassed, so I browbeat the besties into staying silent... no pictures at the second restaurant as the lounge was SO dark (and I haven't quite mastered the use of my camera yet).

E and I shared this :) The best part was the first cake (why can't I remember the name?) though I remember the last cake was supposed to be a sticky toffee pudding, but we both thought it tasted more like warm banana bread. Still good :D

Thanksgiving day was all about the food....


Typically I suppose you see turkey and all the trimmings (potatoes, yam, corn, etc) and while we had all that, my family is large and VERY Filipino at times, so we had a combination Western/Filipino feast! I was planning on taking pictures 'during' the prep process but we were so busy I forgot. So you'll have to make do with pictures of our finished table :D

The table before half the food arrived...

This was in the middle of getting ready... you can see the Palabok has a place front and centre, haha!

Homemade palabok - but we forgot the smoked oysters!

Palabok is my favourite type of pancit... for about a day. Then I realise how much we have left over and I wish to eat something else! My family has a tradition where you MUST eat noodles on your birthday to symbolize a long healthy life - I always want palabok, but as we were celebrating Thanksgiving the day after, I actually had ramen for birthday noodles! The palabok is still amazing though :)

The 'Filipino' side of the table: Fresh lumpia, homemade empanada, lumpia filling, pichi pichi

I love homemade lumpia but the dish is so labour intensive. Currently it's the only Filipino dish I can do by myself from start to finish, but I am working on it! We make the filling, crepes, and sauce from scratch. The empanada are chicken (a friend made these for us) and the pichi pichi are a glutinous rice cake dessert with coconut - but they aren't very sweet!

Now with cassava, a cake, lumpia sauce, and chicken adobo

The mostly complete table (after some rearranging) once the rest of my family arrived! So much of this food is still left over...

It's not quite a croque-em-bouche but it's pretty close... my aunt brought this from work - I love it!

The turkey... 20 pounds! My cousin cooked this - it's already all gone o_o

Hope you enjoyed my weekend of food! For all the Canadians out there - Happy Thanksgiving!!