Dreams of silver tableware, heritage China sets, and Macy’s Day parade footage aside, Alex and I pulled off a damn amazing approximation of an American Thanksgiving on Sunday.
We realized our culinary demands were not local when a) people laughed and looked at me in disbelief when I asked about kitchen gadgets as exotic as a meat thermometer, and b) when I had to hit up not only the grocery store and the food market, but also the hardware store (for serving bowls), the fabric store (for giant sewing needles, in lieu of any “small metal spear” to hold the stuffed turkey bum closed), and the pharmacy (for cheese cloth/gauze and sage).
The guest list: Random and last-minute. I invited three folks a week or two ahead of time, two ecology club/musician acquaintances and my research supervisor. Then I accumulated the others—my host family from September, my four German flatmates, an English teacher from Novgorod’s folk university. A handful of other tentative attendees didn’t show, but we still had a solid 10 or 11 of us, so plenty to be thankful for!
The absentees: Besides the missing guests, we also lacked a few things which you might consider necessities, like the basting bulb and meat thermometer. Oh yeah, and a dishwasher! But Alex is a darling and does 85% of our dishes always, about which I am greedily grateful, and my German flatmates did a busload of dishes after the big event, too. Decorations were meager—a pumpkin centerpiece—but I just didn’t budget enough to make the hand turkeys. (Yeah, you think I’m joking. Try me. I got as far as buying colored paper.)
The menu: turkey, of course. Admittedly, I did almost cheapskate away from the $40 tiny French turkey. In the end, I gave in, thanks in part to Alex’s excited adamance. I also concocted a vision of our feathered friend living like the kobe beef of France, feeding on fois gras between massage sessions…That helped ease the sticker shock. The rest of the fixing were pretty standard–gravy, stuffing, mashed potatoes, roasted root veggies, cranberry sauce from the Russian variety of cranberries (smaller and a bit thinner skinned than the American variety, which is named for its size, Oxycoccus macrocarpus—that’ll teach ‘em that not everything is bigger in Russia J). The night before Alex and I made pumpkin and apple pies. A few of the traditional recipes we left out, like the green bean salad and marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes, because we couldn’t find the right ingredients.
The winning recipes: Alex’s mom’s. She is way more of a foodie than my mom (love of cooking belongs to everyone in the family except my mother, but she dutifully heads the holiday dinners every year), and Alex swooned over his family’s recipes, so I was happy to cooperate. The gravy was absolutely amazing, though it required a great deal of attention, meaning Alex recruited me for some furious scrubbing, chopping, and stirring when I thought I had earned some relaxation as my own dishes, mashed potatoes and roated root veggies, all but prepared themselves. Not sure I’m sold on the Davy family stuffing—putting oysters in a turkey just gets too close to turducken territory—but it was undoubtedly a head above store-bought stuffing.
The suprise: Russians do not eat before the hosts are also seated. That means they wouldn’t even have cheese and crackers and wine, or eat their starter soup, though I encouraged them to help themselves, until Alex had showed up with the turkey and had started hacking away. Not a huge deal, but since we had so many dishes we were trying to get ready with the remaining functional stove in our tiny kitchen, the guests had a bit of a wait! Ah well, more delicious Jarlsberg cheese left for me.
All in all, I was pretty damn impressed with us. The Russians seemed to enjoy the pies, though they went for seconds on the more familiar for them apple pie, rather than gobbling up the exotic pumpkin pie. (Russians only seem to use pumpkin for breakfast, mixing cooked pumpkin with millet. I’ll have to get someone to give me a recipe or show me, since I still have a pumpkin hanging around that a friend gave me on Halloween, though I’ve never in my life prepared millet. On a further unrelated note, my first pumpkin, though it seemed modest, produced 5 purely from scratch pies! My contribution to combating the stereotype that Americans live on fast food, since I managed to feed the pie to three Russian visitors a few weeks ago, my folk singing group and the English students on Thursday, and the Thanksgiving guests on Sunday.J) Next year, I’ll whip up some cranberry vodka to make the evening definitely festive and give it a little hint of Russia, no matter what country I end up in!
The conclusion: Success. J Alex took off four days from work, which we needed to puzzle through recipes, track down ingredients, cook, and wash-wash-wash all the dishes! I’m proud that Alex and I were able to pull off a huge holiday on our own, in a foreign country, with only the help of Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything: the basics and a 6-page e-mail/instruction booklet from Alex’s mom. Made me feel like we were newlyweds, sort of. At one point during furious gravy preparations and turkey timing, Alex said, “Now I know why my mom always looks so harried on Thanksgiving!” After this, I feel confident we can host our own Thanksgiving in the coming years. And if next year doesn’t require that of us, then we will be most thankful helpers to our miraculous moms!
The freaky fall color scheme is an accident.
Alex’s photos of the big event: http://www.flickr.com/photos/49465771@N00/3074632124/in/set-72157610600965600/.
December 8, 2008 at 3:07 am
Inklings from the non-cook. It sounds and looks as if you had a grand time making and consuming your Thanksgiving feast!
Grandma Brown made a lovely feast at her house. Annele brought mashed potatoes, I brought cranberry and sweet potatoes, dad Gulya brought fresh bread and we had a good time. After dinner was spent playing poker of all things.
Now – it’s looking a lot like Christmas with lights and snow on the ground.