Happy Thanksgiving, Reunion Island!

Every time I mention Thanksgiving to Reunion people, the first thing they say is "is that the same thing as Christmas?" So around November, I find myself explaining the story of Thanksgiving a lot. Even though I'll be in the States for Thanksgiving this year, I really wanted to have one here with my French family too. So I was talking to Julie about it one day when I was visiting her new apartment, and she was immediately on board. She was excited to have a reason to entertain at her new place.

I didn't end up finding a French version of Charlie Brown, but I had the English version on in the background anyway for tradition's sake :-)

In hindsight, it was probably not the best idea to plan it for the weekend before I left, since I had a billion other things on my mind. But Julie's excitement was contagious, and last Friday after work, we complied all of my "All-American" recipes, translated them, and went shopping. Saturday morning, we were up at 8am, and by about 10 we had picked up our newly killed turkey from the butcher (a trip, by the way, that was so disgusting it moved me a little closer to vegetarianism.) and had begun to cook. Luckily, Julie's mom was there to help us...otherwise I'm not sure we would have made it...

The butcher asked us if we wanted her to chop the head off for us--which we obviously did--and that sound of the axe coming down was just---ugggg.

So all day, we cooked the old fashioned way--everything was home-made, nothing was easy. For hours, we chopped vegetables into tiny pieces, we swerved between steps from one recipe to another, we listened to music, and we laughed about everything and nothing. 

For the traditional green beans--you know, the ones that take two seconds to make in the US with the canned mushroom soup and little box of crispy onions?--well to do that here, we had to find out how to make our own condensed mushroom soup and our own crispy onions and THEN add them to the normal recipe with our fresh green beans. 

Also, somehow Julie found a real live pumpkin (!) and so to make pumpkin pie, we had to figure out how to make a fresh pumpkin into whatever usually comes in the can in the US. These small differences ended up making everything taste SO amazing. Seriously. They say that Thanksgiving is the one day that Americans eat like the French, and I agree. But when the French put their spin on our Thanksgiving--I have to say, French Thanksgiving is hard to beat. 

Stuffing and sweet potato casserole

The boys came a little after noon to bring us lunch and help us with the turkey. 

Another huge Julie success was that she found a cranberry-like thing in the land of no cranberries. So I made a "cranberry-orange relish" replica that was close enough.

I was thrilled, but I think the family was mostly confused. I tried to explain it like how they eat chutney with foie gras, but I'm not sure it went over as famously as it did with me...

I got a lot of funny questions like "We eat everything at the same time?" (as opposed to courses, like the French do.) And "you eat sweet and salty things together?" (meaning the cranberries, I think, and also the sweet potatoes, which they thought was the dessert. When I told them the pie was for dessert and we eat it after the meal, they all laughed. Actually wait, I think they were mostly laughing because I pronounced dessert wrong.) Anyway, everything was perfect. I was so happy. After dessert, we all played "telephone" with the kids, which resulted in a very embarrassing moment for me when I misheard something, repeated it wrong, and my new sentence apparently meant something weird/sexual. I'm not sure, I was kind of confused. Luckily, so were the kids. (I am laughing again even just writing about this.) 

We were finished with the meal in probably like two hours, which was another topic of conversation. French dinners seriously last all night. 8 hours at least. That was totally my fault. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to not rush through a meal. After four years in the service industry, it is ingrained in my head that people are not to be kept waiting for their food!! 

Julie and I decided that we make a great team, and that Thanksgiving will be our new annual tradition :-)