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Published: November 29th 2009
Thanksgiving
Sofia rolling out the pie crust (with a wine bottle of course...)Hola a todos!
This Friday I celebrated Thanksgiving a day late with my flatmates in our apartment. Unlike Sofia and Mariana, I don't work at my school on Fridays so I had plenty of time to go out and buy all the ingredients for our Thanksgiving feast. I pretty much spent all day buying things or in the kitchen cooking but I had a good time seeing the fruits of my labor! There is a street market in Guardo on Fridays so I went there first where produce is much cheaper than in the supermarkets. I bought sour apples for our pie and green beans. I had to go to 2 different supermarkets before I found sweet potatoes. I was about to give up on having a sweet potato dish when I finally spotted them (called boniatos in Spanish rather than "patatas dulces", the direct translation). They were skinnier and gnarlier than the ones I'm used to seeing in the U.S. but they taste the same! You can't buy cranberry sauce, stuffing mix or ready-made pie crusts here so I bought ingredients to make homemade stuffing (bread, an onion, celery and chicken broth) and flour and butter for the pie
Thanksgiving
Sofia and Mariana shaping the bottom crust layer crust. Turkey isn't eaten much in Spain either so to get a whole turkey for Thanksgiving we would have had to order one far in advance. Dan ended up ordering 2 large turkey breasts which turned out fine for us because we have a small oven and never would have been able to cook a whole turkey anyway (nor eat it all for that matter!). Having to go without cranberry sauce was disappointing but I found that strawberry jam is an satisfactory substitute, though a bit sweet.
Our meal really turned out amazing! I made garlic mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes with pineapple pieces mixed in (they were a hit Mom!) and prepared the filling for the apple pie. Sofia and Mariana helped me make the stuffing and the pie crust later in the afternoon, while Dan, who really knows how to cook all sorts of meat well, took charge of cooking the turkey breasts. We steamed the beans right before we sat down to eat. Aside from the cranberry sauce, the only things we were missing that I'm used to having were homemade dinner rolls and gravy. (We were able to pour some of the meat juice on
our potatoes but there wasn't enough to make gravy really.)
We had one guest at our Thanksgiving dinner, Rodrigo, who is very close to our age and is the son of the owner of the language academy where Dan and I both teach 2 hours a week. It would have been nice to have had more people over but pretty much all of the teachers that we are friends with at our schools leave Guardo on the weekends (if they live here during the week) so that they can be with their families or friends in other places. In the end we still had fun and perhaps it was for the best that we didn't invite a lot of people because we don't have that many plates or tableware at all and we would have had to ask people to bring their own!
We ate dinner around 9:30 pm, in typical Spanish fashion, and afterward we were so full we decided not to eat any of the apple pie until the next day. I had some for breakfast on Saturday morning and it was delicious, hehe ;-D
I miss you all!
Besos,
Dana
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