Black Friday sales have long since started, and I’m now just wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving! Don’t worry, I hardly forgot about my favorite holiday. The past two weeks, I’ve been running around town getting prepared for the big meal — deciding on dishes, hunting down the ingredients, buying necessary host-wares. It was exhausting, to say the least, especially yesterday when I started cooking at about 10 a.m. and barely stopped until our 7 p.m. meal.

This is my oven:

It’s pretty tiny. The largest pan that will fit in it, that I’ve been able to find in China, is a 7×7-inch Reynold’s disposable foil baking tray. Which is what I ended up using to bake the stuffing — in three rounds of near an hour each. Naturally, I couldn’t find a turkey small enough to fit, so I was able to use my oven as an excuse to order one. (Fact: I’ve never actually made a turkey before — cleaning, basting, roasting, carving.) A few Western restaurants serve up Thanksgiving meals as well as have take-out options; one homey restaurant near my apartment went one step further: They delivered (though not for free). They were also “inexpensive.” Turkeys cost anywhere between 70 yuan ($10.50) per kilogram to 1,200 yuan ($180) for a 14-pound one. I got an 8-kilogram turkey with gravy for 600 yuan ($90) from Grandma’s Kitchen.

It wasn’t the best turkey ever, but it wasn’t dry or rock-hard, either. To be fair, it tastes pretty good now, as leftovers. Then again, Thanksgiving leftovers always taste better than they taste fresh.

The full menu: oven-roasted turkey; chestnut mushroom stuffing; tomato bisque with fennel; mustard green beans with ham; mashed sweet potatoes; pumpkin bread; and pumpkin maple pots de creme for dessert. Aside from my tiny oven, Thanksgiving dinner was relatively easy to make. Chestnuts, mushrooms, green beans and sweet potatoes are all hugely popular ingredients in China (chestnuts and sweet potatoes are ubiquitous street snacks). Pumpkins are also sold at most markets, though I just bought imported canned pumpkin. Given how difficult it is to find some staple Western ingredients, I was pretty relieved by how little hassle it was to make all my usual Thanksgiving dishes.

There was just one thing missing: cranberries. Nobody carried fresh cranberries, so I had to serve canned cranberry sauce. Ew! Still, dinner was an overall success, and I had as much fun preparing for it as I did eating it with friends — six people total, including myself, from the U.S., England, Canada and China. Just spreading the joy…

Click through for some pictures.