Thanksgiving in France

Thanksgiving may have been November 28th in the US, but for us it was on Saturday, November 30th with my sister, her husband and step-daughter. Since Thursday was not a holiday in France and my sister had to work, we chose to celebrate on a convenient day!

Beautiful Sunset over the Mediterranean Sea

The first step was to draft a list of foods we wanted to include. The general consensus was yes, a turkey would be important and yet also the most difficult to locate. Cranberry sauce would also be appreciated and perhaps would be more likely to be found as frozen cranberries could sit a while in the frozen section of the store. We decided to rule out pumpkin pie. Most of the attendees weren't planning on eating it anyway and there's no such thing as canned pumpkin puree here. Christine didn't relish the level of effort required to bake the pumpkin, scrape the flesh out and then bake it again into a pie. We settled on pecan pie instead, with mashed potatoes, green beans, salad and sweet potatoes to round it out. We had no oven at our Airbnb so the preparations took place at Nathalie and Patrick's apartment where they set up a beautiful table.

 

Preparing in a narrow (but standard) French Kitchen

It turns out since turkey is more popular for Christmas, you have to preorder your turkey if you want it in November and can only do this at the big supermarket in Monaco. We learned a little too late, but Nathalie was able to score two large turkey legs at a local supermarket. We'd never seen turkey offered that way before, but they were lovely and there was dark meat for everyone!

The improvising continued from there. The cooking crew churned out thinly sliced sweet potatoes and Dave fried them into chips that didn't last until dinnertime. The remaining sweet potato was turned into the less traditional but quite tasty sweet potato au gratin - a blend of French and American cuisines! I think the mashed potatoes were made according to plan and green beans were fairly straightforward. And then there was the pie. Dave's favorite is pecan pie and Christine made apple crisp to ensure we had enough dessert for all our guests. As Dave went to prepare the pie, we found Nathalie had bought walnuts, not pecans, in the store. No matter, Dave would work it out. Oh, and there's no corn syrup - that's a key ingredient. Okay, he'll make his own and fake that part. In the end, we all agreed it was quite tasty and he's a wonderful improviser!

 

Fun and Games at Thanksgiving: Melanie, Nathalie, Christine and Sam enjoyed several games of Carcassonne. Adam enjoyed Patrick's trick magic hat.

Of course, the most important part of Thanksgiving was to be together with family and feeling grateful for all we have in life. Cheers to a wonderful Thanksgiving in Roquebrune-Cap-St Martin, France.