Thanksgiving

Yet another holiday not celebrated here...and why would they?  No mayflower, no pilgrims, no indians that came to the rescue.  Well, we couldn't let Thanksgiving pass uncelebrated mostly because I think it would have made us more homesick.  We prepared a grand menu...the next step was shopping to see if we could get all the stuff we needed.  Interestingly enough we could not find lemons.  Yes lemons, not a single one.  Limes galore, but no lemons.  No worries, we just put a little lime juice into our lemon jello creme mold.  Sweet potatoes...they have a sweet potato called batata but it's white, not orange.  It's a different texture but we through in the marshmallows and brown sugar and it was a great candied sweet potato casserole.  We found stuffing, gravy, and canned cranberry sauce which is not my fav but it worked out well (i read a little OJ jazzes it up, and it did!).

Canned pumpkin!  Not to be found.  I'm sure if we would have gone to the capitol we could have found it but we found a substitute.  There is a squash here that is VERY cheap called auyama.  It's green on the outside, orange in the inside, has the slimy pumpkin stuff with seeds in it, so we cooked it, pureed it, and substituted it for the pumpkin.  I have to say it was pretty darn delicious.  I didn't taste a difference!

Chocolate pudding cook and serve.  My family is quite snobby when it comes to pies...they have to be cook and serve!  Stores here only carry instant sugar free chocolate...which in my opinion is not worth making a pie out of.  I little disappointed I related this to my mom saying we wouldn't be having chocolate pie but she told me she had a recipe from scratch.  I made it and wow...WOW!  It was a little piece of heaven!  Um..I don't' think i'll even buy store bought again!

Lemon cook and serve pudding...MIA.  I will find a way to make you (with no lemons) and have my lemon meringue pie next time!

They had lots of turkeys!  Butterball baby!  Since we had never cooked a turkey we went with the butterball hoping it allowed more room for mistakes.  They also had jennyO which I recognized and then the dominican turkey sold in chunks in case you didn't want a whole turkey.

So when the big day came Dave prepared the turkey!  Neither of us had ever made a turkey before but he volunteered himself.  After several youtube videos and consulting family recipes he made the most delicious turkey EVER!

We invited my new bff Helen and her husband and mom to our feast.  We also invited the Elders (both american) but they can't eat at members' house (i know, shock!) so they came by and picked up a plate.  The meal was AMAZING!!!!  We had the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, homemade rolls, carrots, lemon creme mold, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, apple pumpkin pie, and chocolate pie!  Ah, just naming it makes me full!  All in all it filled our little empty spot for our family and we had a fabulous dinner.

After dinner we played cards (because really that's the only kind of game we own).  You would not believe how much fun we had playing go fish!  It was wild!  Who knew.