Thanksgiving - it's a wrap!

oh wow. Thankgiving went amazing well.

We ended up with I think it was 18-21 ppl, depending on if you count total who came at some point, those who came late, max at one time, etc. I borrowed two tables, and had some great help in setting everything up. It turns out that there isn't really any way to get thanksgiving decorations here, but I used a silver tablecloth with a sorta leafy orange lace-like runner that matched the Solo plates.

Here's the menu:
Appetizers:
vegetable tray with dip by Mordecai
deviled eggs by Daniel
pumpkin bread by Mordecai
(with optional vanilla ginger cream cheese spread)

Main Course: Oven roasted Turkey
Sides:
bread with butter or margarine by Oleg
corn by Anna
cauliflower by Melanie
green bean casserole by Mordecai
sweet potato deliciousness by Emma
deluxe mashed potatoes by Anna Maria
Dairy-free mashed potatoes by Josh
gravy by Mordecai
stuffing by Dahvyd
cranberry jello by Mordecai

Desserts:
dairy-free apple pie
regular apple pie
2 pumpkin pies with whipped cream topping
crepes by Erdos brothers
Ice cream by Stefan


Drinks:
Spiced hot cider by Josh
Water by Artyom
beer by Christoph
Sprite and Diet Sprite by Ricardo
French Wine by Gael
Israeli Wine by Friend of Emma and Shachar whose name I forget

The pumpkin pies were mediocre, partly because I don't own a blender to puree the pumpkin properly and partly because the only pumpkin you can buy here is the big white kind already cut up, which don't make as good of a pie as the small sugar pumpkin ones.

Also, I forgot to put out the cranberry jello, and almost forgot to put out the green bean casserole.
The green bean casserole was a struggle, since you can't buy condensed cream of mushroom soup here, and you can't buy frenches fried onions, and I don't like frying onions because it's hot and boring and uses a lot of oil. But I managed to make my own cream of mushroom soup from scratch, and then used some yellow bread crumbs and a paprika blend and some unseasoned fried onions to put together a crumb topping that matched the tastes of frenchs surprisingly well.

We started off at the table with a sheet of paper instead of a plate. Then, because this was the first thanksgiving for many of the attendees (it was a mix of europeans, israelis and americans), I wanted them to have the full experience, so we began by drawing a hand-turkey, and then turned the paper over to play a sorta scategories-style thankfullness game, where everyone wrote down 3 things they were thankful for, and then we went around the table, reading them off and if more than one person had the same thing on the list, it didn't count. Obviously, with only 3 item list, like half the people won, but it wasn't really for the game anyway. (Plus I joked during the scoring that winning meant you got to clean up.... so lots of people winning was in my favor.)

I baked the pies and the turkey in this kinda stand-alone toaster oven/real oven hybrid that did surprisingly well. (Though it's pretty easy to shock the temperature, unfortunately, causing the cookies I tried to make a while ago to fail pretty miserably.)

The thanksgiving party was an incredible success, though. I did a few things right, kinda on accident. One was that I had the food not on the main tables, so there was room for people. The other was that because the attendee list started at 13 ppl, and grew, I had purchased an extra turkey breast and roasted that by itself in a second smaller toaster oven. it was really easy to carve, and so I had a nice platter of meat that was read to eat, and still had the whole bird that people could see and that I could carve table-side.

The party went from 7 pm to about 1:30. Then I called my parents back in the states, and found out that I had had a bigger thanksgiving here than they had there. Thanksgiving here would have been impossible without the great help of the people who came and pitched in with side dishes, especially since I only had 2 gas burners and one medium toaster/real oven and 1 tiny toaster oven to do my cooking.

My favorite quote from the night was when my housemate Oleg, who is a materials science guy, looked at my fancy shiny plastic fork that had broken and after a few moments said "Bad metallurgy."