Thanksgiving!

Hello,

We had a fabulous Thanksgiving party at our house with about 50 people on the Saturday after the real date. There were three Americans co-hosting, and we had everyone bring a dish (from our approved list of thanksgiving recipes) while we provided turkey and pie. It was tons of fun and everything came out well, I'm very impressed with the abilities of our very multinational guest list to make the traditional American stuff we asked for, especially since most of the ingredients are very hard to track down here! There were some food-finding adventures.

Finishing the gravy and looking a tad demonic. But look! Turkeys!

 

The turkeys themselves were the first challenge: food in Switzerland is very expensive and we didn't really want to spend 250 Swiss Francs (which are about the same value as US Dollars) on just the turkey. The solution was for Martin and me to go to Austria (a town near Liechtenstein where his family normally shops) and pick up pre-ordered turkeys there, which ended up being about 100 Euro for one 7kg and one 12kg turkey. Conversions-wise, I think that's about USD150 for a total of 35lbs of turkey. Very rough calculations there, don't go checking my work. So we saved a lot! But the turkey wasn't the only challenge.

Just one corner of our large table.

Martin cleaning the turkeys after.

Other important thanksgiving ingredients we did without were canned pumpkin (I am becoming a pro at working with the real thing), evaporated milk (we used a cream and milk mixture that actually ended up being delicious, obviously), brown sugar, pecans, and allspice. Swiss people will defend their brown sugar to the death (just try to tell them they don't have it), but it's really just that Sugar in the Raw stuff. Which is great for coffee I guess, but which is really really not brown sugar. The normal fix is to spin molasses into white sugar, but you can't get molasses here either! Eventually I used a molasses-type syrup that we found in Austria with white sugar, and it was close enough. Another expat said they might have some at the Polynesian market on the other side of town, so if I need it again (thankfully I don't really need it in daily life), I might go adventuring. It's possible to get pecans here, but only in a bag of about a half cup. Since that's about six Francs by itself, we just went with walnuts. As for allspice, I am really lucky because Martin's mom has a fully stocked spice cabinet from around the world, so I'll be able to snag a teaspoon or two to make my family's all-important Christmas cookies later this month. Still, this Thanksgiving took a lot of creativity!

Some of the pies!

Everyone came through really well, and we had some very delicious food of which I will try valiantly to get more pictures. Until then, I hope everyone had as much fun as we did.

Katie