Team Work on T-Day

During the past decade, I have spent the majority of my Thanksgivings serving food to others who were celebrating the feast of food, while I myself neither celebrated nor ate as I was too busy working.  This year I did work, but only for three hours.

Thanksgiving dinner was a team event.  At 10 AM Clarisse, Jose and I met in the living room/dining room and walked together to the grocery store.  We planned on making turkey, cranberry sauce,stuffing, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes and apple crisp (Grandma R's recipe).  Jose was in charge of the sauce, stuffing and turkey.  I had the casserole and apple crisp and Clarisse had the potatoes.  We went to four different grocery stores looking for all of the ingredients we needed (most stores do not carry turkey in any other form than sandwich slices and cranberries are not very prevalent either.).  But, we found turkey drumsticks, dried cranberries and a cousin of brown sugar you find in the US (it was in larger crystals like table sugar but brown). We brought everything back to the piso and got to work.  I peeled and sliced the apples for the crisp and then breaded and fried the onions for the green bean casserole.  Clarisse cut the bread and veggies for the stuffing while Jose worked some sort of magic with the cranberries to make a sauce and prepared the turkey for the oven.

Once everything was prepped we headed off to school for a few hours.  When we returned, we finished cooking the turkey, Clarisse whipped up the potatoes (from a packet) and Megan directed the green bean casserole process (since I had never actually eaten nor made a green bean casserole).  The challenge with the green bean casserole was that we didn't have a can of cream of mushroom soup (you know, the 10.5 ounces of cream that keeps the shape of the can once you dump it out).  We only had a packet of cream of mushroom soup, which was too watery for this recipe.  So, we made the packet of soup and Megan stirred, and stirred and stirred (by the way, 'to stir' in Spanish is 'remover'.  Which could be, as an English speaker who might not have seen that word in Spanish before, confusing the first time you read the directions on the soup packet:  put the contents of the packet in a liter of water.  Remover la sopa (soup).  That could be difficult...).  She stirred it until it was reduced down to the correct consistency.  That resulted in only about a quarter cup of soup.  But somehow we made it work. 

Here is our (Spanish) Thanksgiving table:

While we enjoyed our fine meal, the apple crisp was baking in the oven.  It turned out perfectly (it must be the recipe).  We even added our own special touches to it- ice cream (of course) and the leftover cranberry sauce.

We ate at 10:30 PM and we went to bed around 2 AM.  I think I like this side of Thanksgiving dinner better than the working side.