Thanksgiving Dinner Comes Early!

This Friday, I had the great pleasure of sharing Thanksgiving dinner with some international friends (about 25 of them!) at LISEL. As I said before, every Friday night someone cooks a traditional meal from their country, so I took the opportunity to share the meal and the holiday as close as I could to this Thursday! I was so grateful to have everything come out well since I am no expert chef (At home, I usually only make pies and sometimes branch out and make mashed potatoes during the holidays) and we also didn't have any measuring cups, metric or U.S., so it really was a near miracle! I have to give a big thanks to Marie (one of my French friends), Monique (Luxembourgish), Anto (Italian), and Edith (Armenian) for all of their help in the kitchen! Preparations started a day early since we were working with a small kitchen with a tiny oven and enough food for a small army. To add to it, many ingredients that we take for granted in the U.S., like canned pumpkin and cranberry sauce and cornbread mix, aren't available in Luxembourgish supermarkets, so we were starting from scratch most of the time! I didn't mean to impose my vegetarianism on everyone, but whole turkey's are hard to find this time of year in Luxembourg, so that was the one plate left out. On the menu were mashed potatoes, cranberry-apple sauce, stuffing, glazed ginger carrots, and pumpkin pie for dessert. "So, Americans do eat something besides hamburgers" was one of my favorite comments, made by a friend from Pakistan. I'm always happy to help disprove unjust stereotypes when it comes to American culture and traditions! It was fun to have to indicate that cranberry sauce is supposed to be served cold and that it's not usually for dessert, although without the turkey, that does make for a strange mix. I'm happy to say that I'll be sending out the recipe for pumpkin pie to a few friends!

Best wishes to you and your families this Thanksgiving! We always have so much to be grateful for!

Take care,
Erica

P.S. See the pictures posted above! (when they finally upload) ;)