France-giving

I got two Thanksgivings this year!  I didn't even expect to get one, since obviously it's not a holiday here, so I was quite happy as it's my favorite holiday.

The first one was at the LISA, the dorm where all the other primary assistants live.  They somehow managed to find sweet potatoes (la chance!) and we also had turkey breasts, pumpkin soup, mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and bunch of different desserts.  It was a lot of fun! 

I also went ahead with the Thanksgiving I had planned for yesterday.  I pre-ordered a turkey, and did my best to make "traditional" Thanksgiving food for my housemates and Gwenaëlle.  Trying to make something so quintessentially American in a foreign country was like some kind of bizzare Food Network challenge (make gravy without chicken broth!  make stuffing without liver!  make pumpkin pie without canned pumpkin!  etc), but I improvised.  Nobody knows what it's "supposed" to taste like, anyway.  I had a moment of panic when the gas went out and the stove stopped working, but luckily other people were home to fix it.

I managed to make a turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and a dessert that can only be described as a "pumpkin something".  I also had my little jar of cranberry sauce that I found a couple weeks ago when I went to a grocery store in the country that randomly had a bunch of import food (again, la chance!)  I basically cooked all day yesterday.  The turkey was the biggest adventure, even though it was a "small" turkey (4 kilograms, about 9 pounds).  I put "small" in quotation marks because to me it was a tiny turkey, but the French people kept commenting on how big it was.  I guess that's big to them, because as the butcher put it, "we don't have any of those ridiculously big American turkeys over here".  I had to buy a special pan and it all barely fit in the oven.  I repeat, this was a 9 pound turkey.

American friends: cue laughter at the thought that this is a "big turkey".  It's seriously barely even possible to find a turkey this small in the USA - back home, this is basically a chicken.

Everybody seemed to like the main dishes.  The cranberry sauce and the pumpkin pie are more particular flavors, so I think feelings were more mixed about those.  As I have previously mentioned, cranberries don't exist here, and while pumpkin is everywhere, it's not eaten as a "sweet" flavor.  However, I really put all my effort into the turkey and the stuffing, and those were a unanimous success, so I was pretty pleased with my efforts.  Actually, the stuffing was particularly good, as I had a tasty fresh French baguette to make it with.

I should point out that I could not have done it without a few frantic e-mails and phone calls to my dad, the expert.  He said he felt like he made Thanksgiving twice this year.  Well thanks to him, this one was a success.

More pictures!

I look so thrilled in all these pictures because I couldn't believe I actually succeeded at making a turkey...

It looks like Thanksgiving!

This is the "pumpkin something" - I didn't buy the right kind of crust, so it was more of a tart than a pie, but it actually tasted OK.  Then again, I love pumpkin in any form.

4 more people have now experienced American Thanksgiving.  Yay!