So, you may be wondering, loyal readers, how I celebrated that delicious American holiday of Thanksgiving so far from home? Well, Thursday night my good friend and fellow assistant Lauren opened her home to all us transient ex-pats on the condition that we all bring something besides the turkey* she was providing. We gladly obliged and had ourselves a surprisingly amazing showing of old traditions as well as some new ones. Thursday night I left my house with my friend Ana and on our way to Lauren's (who lives a bit out of the way) we kept meeting more and more assistants at metro and bus stops. We formed a sort of pilgrimage across the city with our tin-foiled dishes in hand and plastic sacks. I think we were quite a spectacle, and one French woman on the metro even wished us a "bonne fête" after asking us where we were from! My friend Kettie, who celebrates a more "Hatian version" of Turkey Day brought fried plantains and 2 kinds of pasta salads (one veggie for me!), Ana who is a Spanish assistant made 2 lovely tortillas des patatas which are traditional nosh in Spain. There were brussel sprouts, glorious mashed potatoes, green beens with roasted almonds, and 2 kinds of stuffing. Brittany's mother even mailed her a can of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce which we thinly sliced into 15 pieces!! For dessert we had three varieties of pumpkin pie, one sweet potato-buttermilk pie, a chocolate mousse pie, homemade donuts, vanilla ice cream and whipped cream!
*Kudos to Lauren for finding a whole turkey (not something that is common in France), after several personal visits and calls to a local butcher.
I kind of overdid it and spent all day Wednesday cooking chez moi with Ana. Wednesday morning I dragged her to 2 different outdoor markets in addition to the grocery store and ended up preparing 4 separate dishes: creamed spinach (adapted from Smitten Kitchen), mashed sweet potatoes with marshmallows, an apple-pear-rasin-ginger compote, and a pumpkin pie. Phew. In retrospect I might have been better off making just one, but lets just say, I learned a lot, and everyone really appreciated everything I brought.
To sum up, here are some things I have learned from my very fist ex-pat Thanksgiving:
- Do not attempt cooking 4 dishes to bring to the soiree, stick with 1. Especially when the kitchen you are working with is not equipped with a dishwasher
- Do not attempt baked goods (i.e. pumpkin pie) if the extent of one's oven's settings is a gauge going from 1 to 10
- On the same subject of our favorite dessert, do not attempt when it is necessary to dismember half a pumpkin to achieve what we know in the US as Libby's canned pumpkin
- You know the spinach you bought from the market is fresh when you take it home to wash and find multiple tiny slugs hidden inside
- It is hard, but not impossible, to enjoy Thanksgiving leftovers without a microwave
these rustic beauties. Apparently we American girls are masochists. I feel a lot closer to my pilgrim ancestors after such an authentic experience of taking a machete to an actual pumpkin. Mine is the 3rd up from the bottom!
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