Thanksgiving

There is no Thanksgiving in Spain, but we still wanted to celebrate. Unfortunately, We don’t get any days off to celebrate in Spain, and our weekdays are too busy with school, sports and music, so we decided to celebrate on Sunday.

We invited the family of one of of Oliver’s friends to join us. They were excited and curious to celebrate an American Thanksgiving, which they had only seen in movies.

The first task was finding all of the ingredients to make a traditional American Thanksgiving meal.

We were able to order a turkey from our butcher. It was smaller than the turkeys we normally get in the States, but that was fine, since we were going to have a small gathering. There were a few more differences and surprises. First, the turkey wasn’t completely free of feathers:

It also still had the neck:

Luckily it fit in our small oven

Cranberry sauce was not available in the 3 grocery stores we visited, so we made it from scratch from dried cranberries from the Mercadillo since fresh cranberries were also not available.

Also unavailable was pumpkin purée and, as we already knew from our a Halloween pumpkin hunt, getting a fresh pumpkin would be near impossible. We were able to order some from England on the Spanish Amazon.

As we prepared to cook, we realized we didn’t have a pan to fit the turkey or pie pans. After trips to 5 stores and another Spanish Amazon order, we were able to obtain the right pans, something to baste the turkey, and a meat thermometer.

After finally gathering all of the ingredients, Todd, Oliver, Leo and I prepared our first Thanksgiving meal completely on our own:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

We almost ate outside, since it was 65 degrees, but it started to cool off right before sitting down, so we decided to take the meal inside.

It was a bit of an adventure procuring the ingredients and cooking, and we sat down to eat an hour later than we planned, but surprisingly everything turned out great and our friends really enjoyed their first Thanksgiving.

Finally, our thanksgivings in the States often include playing football, but since this Spain, we played fútbol.