Thanksgiving Housewarming

Thirteen of our friends came over to our place for a traditional Thanksgiving feast.  The festivities started around 11am when our friends Josh & Marilyn showed up at our place with their oven and a 15 lb turkey brine-ing in plastic bucket filled with a salt bath & spices.  They brought over their oven so that we could have two ovens going at once. So at this point you might be wondering to yourself,  "How in the world did they bring their oven over?"  Well out here nationals don't use ovens, and so apartments only have stoves but no ovens.  As a result many expats end up buying really big toaster ovens to use as an oven. Our ovens are just big enough to fit a 15 lb turkey in it - meaning the sides of the turkey were literally almost touching the sides of the oven, and the top was almost hitting the heating element.  Not a lot of breathing room.

For the next 4-5 hours they worked on roasting the turkey while I made chicken pot pie from scratch.  I had actually started doing some cooking the night before because I knew there'd be a lot of traffic in our kitchen on Thanksgiving Day, so I had already made homemade brownies and prepped a green bean casserole the night before.  One awesome thing about celebrating Thanksgiving in a foreign country is that you end up having really delicious meals because you have no other choice but to make everything from scratch if you want to eat it.  There's no frozen or canned green beans, so I had to use fresh ones.  There's no pre-made pie crusts, or frozen chicken pot pies for that matter, so I had to make the crust, sauce, and make all the filling from scratch.  Our friend who made pumpkin pie had to make her own pumpkin puree from a pumpkin because we couldn't find canned pumpkin puree.  The result is that you spend way more time in the kitchen prepping meals, but the outcome is well worth it because let me tell you, we had a feast and it was absolutely delicious!  

Sweet potatoes, salad with homemade dressing, 2 kinds of mashed potatoes (garlic and sour cream/bacon/chives), homemade bread, apple cider, egg nog, turkey, chicken pot pie, green bean casserole, stuffing, 2 pumpkin pies, a sweet potatoe pie, and brownies - all from scratch!  Our friend who made the stuffing actually had to buy baguettes, dry them out in the oven, and them crumble them by hand because you can't just go out to the store to buy croutons here.  To make sour cream you have to add vinegar to heavy whipping cream until it thickens.  There's no such thing as instant mashed potatoes, or apple cider from a packet.  You've got to add all the spices to a crock pot and let it simmer.  And boy is it good.

Even a turkey is hard to come by.  Usually we never eat turkey out here, but since there are so many foreigners and I guess specifically Americans in our city, around Thanksgiving it is possible to order a turkey, but you have to go through some great lengths to get it.  Our friend Josh and my cousin Jeremy had to travel over an hour by subway to the other side of the city to pick up our frozen 15 pound turkey and lug it back along with other foreign ingredients they picked up for the rest of us at a foreign food market.

The other interesting thing about celebrating in another country is that B and I didn't have the traditional wedding registry where we got things like place settings for 8-12 people.  As a result we had to scrap together every last plate and utensil in the kitchen to have enough place settings for all of us to sit around the table to have a sit-down meal all together like a family.  Some people were eating off of Christmas decorated plates and little tiny plates.  We managed to find enough knives for each person to have one (between the 4 regular knives, 6 steak knives and other small enough knives in our knife block, and a couple of paring knives we had) but unfortunately our fork situation wasn't quite up to par.  So, being in another country, we improvised.  People who didn't have forks got a spoon and...a pair of chopsticks.  I was one of those people and it actually worked out quite nicely.  You could use the spoon to hold the turkey while you were cutting it, and then use the chopsticks to pick it and other things up that were too hard to pick up with a spoon.  Yet the spoon also came in handy when eating the chicken pot pie and green bean casserole because you could get maximum sauciness in your mouth with the spoon.  One of our friends, Matt, who was sitting next to me actually had a fork but went to get a pair of chopsticks just so he could say he ate with chopsticks on thanksgiving, something he had never experienced on Thanksgiving day in his previous 28 years of living.