We celebrated Thanksgiving last Sunday, three days after the actual holiday in the US. To make the event more interesting, we invited a friend of mine from work and his family to join us. Having 9 people there for the meal made it seem more like it was worth going through all of the trouble to prepare it.

Thanks to Sandi, we had a very nice, traditional meal, even though it was difficult to buy some of the ingredients necessary. We had:

  • Turkey (whole turkeys are surprisingly easy to find this time of year in Germany; even though they obviously don’t celebrate Thanksgiving here, many magazines promote the idea of a “fall feast” and present all kinds of recipes to be served along with a turkey)
  • Cornbread stuffing (although Sandi had to use chicken noodle soup in it for the broth)
  • Cranberry sauce (made from cranberry preserves. Germans food companies are fond of advertising cranberries as “real American cranberries.”)
  • Corn casserole (very close to the original recipe, although Sandi had to cream the corn herself.)
  • Broccoli Cheese casserole (we had to substitute Emmental Swiss cheese for the Cheddar cheese normally used; non-white cheeses are extremely uncommon in Germany. The casserole had a different (but good) taste because of the switch.)
  • Pistachio Salad (This was probably the hardest recipe to duplicate of the whole bunch. We had to use real cream, since Cool Whip, with all its artificial non-dairy ingredients would be nearly verboten in Germany. Plus there’s no pistachio pudding available here. We used vanilla pudding and added chopped pistachios ourselves.)
  • Sweet potato casserole (with fresh sweet potatoes and freshly coconut from the shell. It’s possible to buy sweet potatoes here, even though a lot of Germans consider them pig food. We did have to be careful about the varieties, though. We found some vegetables that were labelled as sweet potatoes that were white on the inside and had a bizarre texture.)
  • Pumpkin pie (made from freshly cooked pumpkin. Mmmm.)
  • Pecan pie (made using a liquid sweetener that we substituted for corn syrup. Corn syrup is used in Germany, but only in manufactured foods. It is hard to buy for personal use. I’m not sure why, except that people seem to prefer pure sugar instead.)

Martin Kuner, his wife Monika and his two daughters, Charlotte and Franceska, came to our apartment about 2:00 on Sunday. Our kids, of course, were really excited about having visitors and had a great time showing off all their toys. The Kuner girls, for their part, enjoyed dressing in our kids’ dress-up clothes, especially the wedding dress that Nana Cotton made last summer.

I also had recorded the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which we played to help add to the atmosphere. Charlotte was especially impressed with all of the Broadway singing and dancing at the beginning. (I have to admit though, it was really depressing to see how much time NBC spent NOT showing the parade. Instead they spent a huge amount of time trying to convince you about how great NBC is through endless promos and self-serving interviews of NBC celebrities.)

The dinner was delicious. Everything turned out really well, and our guests seemed to agree. The kids, of course, we still much more interested in playing than in eating, so they did not eat very much. The adults, however, made up for it. The corn casserole, the broccoli casserole and particularly the sweet potato casserole were favorites.

Not surprisingly, the kids did return long enough to eat pie. They all probably would have eaten more if we had let them.

We all finished the evening stuffed and sleepy, which I suspect is a sign of a good thanksgiving meal.

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