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Thanksgiving 2002

Monday, December 16, 2002

Thanksgiving is pretty much a North American holiday. I have heard that some of the English celebrate Thanksgiving on July 4 (Independence Day in the U.S.) but I don't think that's quite the same thing. Since Canada celebrates Thanksgiving in early October and the U.S. celebrates in late November, Sara and I get to celebrate it twice. This year we made a small Canadian Thanksgiving dinner for ourselves in October, but we decided that for American Thanksgiving we would have some of our Swedish friends over to celebrate with us.

Since we moved to a new apartment on December 1, which is larger and much better for having company, we actually waited until the first weekend in December. This made the week rather busy, since we had to move in, get everything put away, prepare the apartment for visitors and shop and cook dinner. We had about 10 people including us, which is about the most we've had to cook for even back home. But it all turned out quite well.

The biggest challenge was trying to reproduce a traditional Thanksgiving meal with Swedish ingredients. There are some foods you can't get here, and other foods are not quite the same. So we had a few substitutions and experiments, most of which worked well.

Turkey: You can get turkey here, although it's not nearly as common as it is in the U.S. at this time of year. However, the turkeys are much smaller here. At home we frequently get turkeys weighing 20 pounds (9 kg) or more. At the store we usually shop at here the turkeys weigh about 3.5 kg (7.5 pounds). We went to a bigger store which did have some larger turkeys -- about 7 kg (15.5 pounds). So we ended up buying one of the large ones and one of the smaller ones. We cooked one of them the day before so we would be sure to have enough meat. Cooking the turkey also takes significantly longer than it usually does at home -- the oven in our apartment doesn't work as well as our oven in the U.S. But Sara has had enough practice with it now that we had everything ready at the right time.
Stuffing: I don't think people here are used to eating stuffing, but it wasn't any problem making it -- all of the ingredients are accessible. Sara has recently found a new recipe for stuffing in one of her Pampered Chef cookbooks which we really like. (We have trouble cooking here with many of Pampered Chef recipes because they rely on ready-made foods that aren't available here, but this one worked fine.)
Mashed Potatoes and Gravy: Again, no problem making mashed potatoes. People here eat potatoes quite a bit, although not usually mashed. The gravy was a bit more difficult, but Sara has practiced a few times now. We did get a few questions about what to put the gravy on -- I think everybody knew it went with the potatoes, but weren't sure about the turkey and stuffing.
Jello: This was one of the big experiments. They don't really sell Jello in Sweden. There are a couple of American Food stores that sell that sort of thing, but the nearest one is in Stockholm, and we weren't able to buy any for this meal. They do sell unflavored gelatin. So after some searching on the Internet, we added water and juice concentrate to the gelatin. We tried a small test batch to start with, which was too strong. So for the real thing we adjusted the amount of concentrate. The result wasn't too bad, but it wasn't quite firm enough and still a bit too strong. So it would probably take a few more trials to get it right. Or more likely we'll just wait until we get back to the U.S. The Swedes were happy to try it though -- most of them had never had Jello before.
Marshmallow Salad: This was one of the successes of the evening. You can buy marshmallows at some stores (on the American Food shelf), but it's definitely not a common Swedish food. So the marshmallow salad (or "5 cup salad" -- sour cream, marshmallows, coconut, mandarin oranges, and pineapple) was new to most people. It turned out quite well, and was well-liked.
Yams: The yams turned out well too. My family always made candied yams. Last year some friends used a different kind of recipe that is more like an apple crisp, which we really liked. But we decided to stick with the more traditional recipe this year. They don't have canned yams, so we used the fresh ones, which made it taste better anyway. (Well, Sara would always use fresh ones anyway -- my family usually uses canned.) They were large yams, and tasted quite good. This was another new dish for everybody, and most seemed to like them.
Punch: We made a simple punch with cranberry juice, pineapple-orange juice concentrate, orange juice, and 7-up. I don't think most people had ever had this sort of punch, but they drank plenty of it that night, so I guess it went over well.
Pies: Usually at home we use ready-made pie crusts, but that wasn't an option here, so we had to make them from scratch. They turned out okay, although they were a bit too salty. We couldn't find pumpkin (canned or fresh), so we weren't able to make a pumpkin pie. We decided that a sweet potato pie would be pretty close, so we tried that. It turned out quite well, and did taste similar to pumpkin. We also made an apple pie -- we've had apple pie in Sweden, but their apple pie is a bit more like apple crisp. So we tried to make a more American one. We didn't have the best recipe, so it didn't turn out as well as we would have liked. It was okay, but I think the Swedes will stick with their own apple pie.

Overall everything turned out well, and everybody seemed to have a good time. Like in the U.S., there was lots of eating and talking and sitting around and just having a good time. We enjoyed sharing a bit about the U.S. holiday traditions, and spending time with our new friends.