Lex Libertas

How I Miss Thanksgiving!

While I never fully realized it until now, Thanksgiving is one my of my favorite holidays. What it lacks in presents, dressing up, or green beer, it makes up for in food. Quite possibly the best meal of the year, it contains many of my favorite dishes since childhood - yams, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. I was never a big turkey fan, and in any case I much preferred the sides.

Now, like my birthday, I will have to spend this holiday in a foreign country where I don't speak the language, and have precious few friends to celebrate with. In fact, the only other American I know here is my roommate. In case I didn't fully explain before, my roommate is not English, nor is he named Patrick like I was told. His name's Wolf, and he's from New York, though originally raised in New Mexico. Which is good, because we've had many cathartic conversations about our longings for Thanksgiving and Mexican food. He, however, is going home for Christmas, so he'll have a chance to satisfy these cravings. My year in France, the UC program director arranged for all the UC students from Grenoble, and the neighboring city of Lyon to come together and we had an excellent, catered Thanksgiving dinner. No such luck this time around.

So, instead of wallowing in my misery on this fabulous day (I've been wallowing for two weeks already, I need a break), I've decided to make my own Thanksgiving Day meal – while listening to “Don't Worry Be Happy,” by the immortal Bobby McFerrin. Incidentally, the local five star hotel (Grand Hotel Europe) is having a Thanksgiving special all day today, with what looks like honest to goodness traditional food. The only problem is that it really is a five star hotel, and they charge accordingly. The price for their restaurants (they have several, huge facility) is usually upwards of $30 per person. Alas, that being out of my range, I'll make do with what I have.

Here is my Thanksgiving dinner:
(click on pictures for bigger image)

Trying to match as closely as possible to traditional food, in spirit if not taste, color, or texture, I've prepared the following. Format is “Normal Dish” = “Replacement”

Stuffing = Buckwheat
Cranberry sauce = Cherry yogurt
Turkey = Frozen vegetables
Yams = Poppyseed roll
Pumpkin pie = Tiny candy

To drink, I had assorted berry juice, though it bears a disturbing resemblance to blood. That tiny sliver of tissue paper you see under my fork is the normal napkin for these parts. As for the main course, I'll leave it your imagination to formulate the wonderful richness of its succulent flavors. In case you don't know what “buckwheat” is, it's a generic, bland, grain that is prepared by boiling it in water. It doesn't taste very good, but it kind of looks like stuffing. Cranberry sauce and cherry yogurt are both red and somewhere in between solid and liquid. Turkey to vegetables is probably the most counter-intuitive of the list, but the meat here looks frightening, and I don't really know how to cook it anyways. Besides, I'm in desperate need of natural color in my diet. The poppyseed rolls here are quite good, imagine a cinnamon roll. Replace the cinnamon with poppy seeds, instead of slathering it in icing, put a conservative amount of thin chocolate on the top, and use the same sweetbread. Voila, closest thing to mashed yams with marshmallow on top that I could think of. I haven't really seen pies here, although they do plenty of cakes, and lots of filled pastries. That being the case, I decided to pick a candy whose color ressembled the creamy brown of pumpkin pie. This local favorite, “Karovka,” is quickly becoming one of mine as well. It's like flavored sugar – can't get much better than that. This particular one is caramel.

There we have my thanksgiving meal – it may not be what the pilgrims ate, but the spirit is about the same. Displaced travelers enjoying the native cuisine and giving thanks for all that they have – while at the same time freaking out about the coming winter. The only thing missing on my end are friendly natives to help out with the local food.

Posted by Owen at November 27, 2003 08:21 PM | TrackBack