Thanksgiving, it's all about football, family and being on the last Thursday of November. Ours had none of this. A friend of my roommates is American (kind of), he was born in germany because his Dad was posted in the American section of Berlin before the wall came down. That being said he has no accent whatsoever, when he speaks english it's like an American, when he speaks german it's like a German and when he speaks french it's like the French. In any case Steve's family always celebrated Thanksgiving together here. Unfortunately this year his entire family bailed on him. Fortunately they had already bought all of the food for the meal. So Steve called up Marine and Tobi to see if he could have it at our place with a few friends. A giant free meal? I guess that's okay.
SO I'm out all day doing.. well something I don't really remember. To make the story more interesting we will say that I was out training chimps to use jet packs while operating surgical lasers. Yeah that sounds about right. When I get home it is about 4:00pm and steve is pulling into the driveway just as I am getting in. I help him bring everything in and then it turns out that the Turkey is still completely uncooked. Just so we are clear, it wasn't cooked and still needed more time, he had not started to cook the turkey at all, or even prepped it. It turns out steve had never made a turkey before or any other part of a thanksgiving dinner. Don't get me wrong, Steve can cook, just he underestimated the amount of time everything takes. So me with my, "helped make a couple turkeys" busted on the cooking scene. Steve had planned to have dinner at 7:30-8:00.... that wasn't going to happen. I show steve all the tricks I have learned about making turkeys: butter and seasonings underneath the skin, basting, some other things I think I made up, you know all the staples of making a turkey. So we finally get the bird into the oven at about 5:30, and know to attend to everything else to be done. Here's a list of the things that needed to be cooked (all from scratch with nothing prepped).
1. sweet potatoes
2. cranberry sauce
3. potato roasties
4. peas in some weird white sauce that was really good
5. Carrots
6. Gravy
7. Stuffing
So Steve and I took the initiative and booted everyone else out of the kitchen for most of the night. To be honest most of the things did not take very long, it was a lot of waiting for the turkey. The Cranberry sauce was awesome, it have orange zest in it so it was a really nice mixture of sweet, sour and bitter citrus. The sweet potatoes were done with garlic, which doesn't sound like it would go together, but it very much does. The Roasties were just simply tossed in garlic, herbs and olive oil and baked. Carrots were just boiled, because that is how carrots roll. The gravy was really good because we basted the turkey with a maple sauce and that was al in the gravy. The stuffing in my opinion was kind of gross, it was mostly ground pork, and I am used to bread crumb stuffing, but thats me. Then there were the peas. I don't understand it all that much, but after the peas are cooked you add ingredients into them to make a white sauce that is mostly flour, and somehow it turns delicious... My guess is witchcraft, early american pilgrims were all about the witchcraft.
So we wait for the turkey, and wait, and wait. Everyone got to the house and were all waiting (expecting dinner to have been ready at 8:00) and staring at Steve and circling the kitchen. In attendance were the four of us who live in the house (Marine, Tobi, Bertron, and Me), Steve, Jessie (friend of the house. fun fact: She's from poland), and two of Steve's friends who were visiting (I don't remember their names, they were french and they rolled with that). So almost half of those in attendance were french, not so bad. The problem is that everyone except for Jessie and I spoke French ( the two nameless frenchies spoke english but no german). So you would think that seeing that sue to all the language problems that english would be the way to go so that everyone could understand, but no. French dominated that night, and nothing against the language (it's next on my list of languages to learn), but Jessie and I were both sitting pretty awkwardly doing what little we could to steer the others toward english, or at least german, I can keep up sometimes when it's german. Neither of these happened. The food was good (as was the wine) but the conversation remained out of reach. It's one of those odd moments when you really wish that you had a more multicultural upbringing, especially when it comes to language.
Also one small moment to be judgement about the french couple that came (they were together by the way). The girl was 20, and the guy looked to be in easily in his mid thirties. I've been watching Mad Men lately and some of the relationships in that show creeped me out less then this one. OK judgement time over.
So re-cap
Me = still unable to understand french
thanksgiving = delicious
Steve = now knows how to make a turkey
the french couple = kind of creepy
(PS: Sorry I forgot to take pictures of any of this, do not worry the next few post I have planned have pictures. YAY!!)
Scene
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