Thanksgiving in Germany, aka the Trial Run

This year's turkey day was far from traditional. It was business as usual at the Waldorf Schule all week, and that Thursday was no different. Thursday is always conference day and each week the teachers get together for hours to talk about what is going on at the school. And, when I say hours, I mean we usually don't get home till at least 7 pm. Maybe we'll expound on the Waldorf conferences another time.

What made this particular Thursday unique was that we were invited to go to a concert in Braunschweig with our colleague Rolf (Rolf also happens to give the Japanese English teacher, Mike, and me German lessons, but that's another thing). He happened to come across three free tickets to Herman van Heen's show. We left school immediately after the conference and hitched a ride with some other colleagues for the 30 minute trip to Braunschweig to make the concert at 8:00. Even though we had to run to the train station, take the train back to Wolfsburg, and then grab a bus back to Detmerode to arrive home by midnight, the adventure and craziness were well worth it. The show was entirely in German, but the humor, the poignancy of some of his comments, and, of course, the musicality still came through to me. (It also helps that I have picked up some basic German and my companions translated some things for me.) Van Heen sang, played violin and guitar, and told a lot of jokes -- most of which were quite dark. He also had a great accompanists on piano, violin, viola, and guitar. It was a very, very good evening.

Our more traditional thanksgiving came that Saturday, when we went in the kitchen in the morning and didn't come out until much later in the day. We had invited Annette, Jo, and Benjamin over to share dinner with us and we obviously had to live up to the expectations of an elaborate American thanksgiving dinner. We had picked up the largest turkey we could find at the grocery store earlier in the week -- a whole eight pounds! This was acutally plenty to feed the five of us and still leave enough for a week of leftovers. I was curious as to how the bird would turn out since we had no roasting pan and a weird European oven, but all in all, it was just fine.... maybe a tad on the dry side.

We also made mashed potatoes, green beans, corn on the cob (definitely NOT like what we're used to... unfortunately), wild rice (yes, we found wild rice in Germany... though I don't think it's real wild rice), stuffing (soooooooo good...), gravy (out of the turkey juices), and pumkin soup.

Surprisingly, pumpkin soup is amazingly delicious. We were introduced to it at school when one of the French teachers made it for her birthday for a mid-conference break treat. This was the second pumpkin soup we made out of Hokaido pumpkins. There is a bit of freshly grated parmesean cheese sprinkled on top. (Funny side note, at least to me: we were re-watching episodes of Top Chef the night before, in particular, the one where Jessie puts too much cayenne pepper in her squash soup. Guess what I did to our pumpkin soup...)

Here's our spread. I know... we made a lot of food.

Another view of our food.

The main event...

Mike attempting to carve the turkey...


We had a very Thanksgiving-like table cloth.

For dessert, we made an apple crisp with rice flour (becaue Annette can't have glutin). It was perfect with vanilla ice cream.

All in all, I am very proud of the dinner we made for Thansgiving. I can't believe we pulled off each dish and that it all tasted good!

The one thing that was missing for Mike was pumpkin pie. This void, however, was quickly filled. Mike and his 12th grade English class read an article about the Amercian celebration of Thanksgiving, which happened to include a recipe for pumpkin pie. Pumpkins and pies are not strange to Europeans, but pumpkin and pie together is a whole other story. So intrigued were his students that the asked to make pie during class... and that's what they did. Everything was done from scratch -- no condensed milk, no canned pumpkin. Some how they ended up making enough filling for about eight pies, so Mike and I made a few extras one morning before school...

Our homemade pie crust...

Whipping our own whipped cream.

And the final product.

Everyone was surprised that pumpkin in pies actually taste okay! Chisako, the Japense English teacher liked how it wasn't too sweet. Nevertheless, we ended up with a lot of leftover pie... we definitely had it as lunch a few times...

The big test of our culinary skills, however, is coming this Monday where we are making a "Thanksgiving dinner" for the all of the teachers after the staff production of the nativity play. Of course turkey is on the menu. There will also be three kinds of potatoes, a salad, a little bit of stuffing, wild rice, and some desserts that include cake, apple crisp, and pumpkin pie. Annelie, Mike, and I will start cooking as soon as school gets out. Hopefully it all goes well!