Thanksgiving Adventures in Spain

Well, Thanksgiving dinner was a success! The pies were cooked all the way through, the mashed potatoes and sweet potatoes were creamy and sweet, the stuffing tasted like real stuffing, and the turkey looked and tasted like Thanksgiving turkey. Now, this may not seem like much, as I’m sure that all of you had similar food this weekend that was as good (and probably better) than our Thanksgiving dinner here in Spain. But for three “guiris” who had never made Thanksgiving dinner before, last night’s day after Thanksgiving dinner was nothing short of a miracle. Let me explain.

This weekend, just like every other year, my entire family went to Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving Day at Grandma’s, cut down the Christmas tree on Friday morning, had Thanksgiving dinner (again) at the other Grandparent’s Friday night, and are probably decorating the house and the tree for Christmas as I write this. Most of my friends are home in San Jose with their families, visiting each other, and celebrating the weekend full of family traditions. The last time I missed Thanksgiving was 3 years ago when I was studying in Madrid. I don’t really get homesick, but every once in a while I get “people sick,” if there is such a thing. Thanksgiving weekend is my favorite weekend of the year, and this year, just as three years ago, I missed my family more than usual. As much as I missed my family this weekend, every other day in Spain thus far has been incredible, special and unforgettable, as was this weekend. Instead of spending the weekend thinking about not being home for Thanksgiving, I had my own version of Thanksgiving here in Spain.

For Thanksgiving (or rather, they day after Thanksgiving), two of my good American friends, Cerena and Suzanne, and I put on a huge Thanksgiving dinner for all of our Spanish “familia.” We sent out a tuenti (like Facebook, but in Spain) and e-mail invite to all of our Spanish friends and roommates a few weeks ago inviting everyone for a day-after Thanksgiving feast that would start on Friday night at 10:00pm at Suzanne’s house. I’m always excited about Thanksgiving weekend, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited about the actual Thanksgiving dinner in my life. Granted none of us had ever cooked a turkey (or any other part) of Thanksgiving dinner before last night, we were ecstatic to cook for and celebrate the holiday with our Spanish friends. As for the many challenges and adventures involved in cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 17 people in Spain, well, that’s what made Thanksgiving dinner 2009 so memorable.

We started cooking everything yesterday around noon, but the preparation started much earlier. Thursday evening, Suzanne, Cerena and I went shopping for all (almost) of the necessary Thanksgiving ingredients minus the turkey and the fruits/veggies. We went to Mercadona to get the food and to the Chinese store to buy a turkey pan and a casserole for the stuffing. I came home that night, cooked dinner, skyped with my family, and then made chocolate chip cookie dough at midnight while listening to Christmas music. It was just like baking at home around the holidays (except for the fact that I mixed the dough with a spoon instead of a hand mixer, and the fact that the brown sugar isn’t packed and that there is no real baking soda). I woke up Friday morning, baked the cookies, and then went out to buy all of the fruits and vegetables from Paco. I bought celery (rare here), apples for the pies, and various fruits (normal fruit, like bananas, oranges, and plums, and Spanish fruit, like Sharoni and Chirimoya). I went to Suzanne’s around noon with two bags full of food and a cutting board, mixing bowl, and good chopping knives.

We started with the desserts, because according to my mom and the New York Times Thanksgiving “Timing is Everything” article, it’s best to get the desserts out of the way. We made two apple pies from scratch without using shortening in the crust. Suzanne and Cerena did most of the work on the pies while I ran out to buy fresh oregano, thyme, sage, and rosemary for the turkey at a medicinal herbs mercado. When I came back, the dough was chilling in the freezer, the apples were sliced, and we were ready to prepare the turkey. Oh the turkey. Let me start by saying that whole turkeys in Spain are hard to find, and that four days ago, we didn’t even know where to find one. Let me also say that when you buy a “whole” turkey in Spain, you get the whole turkey—head, wings, and feathers included. Needless to say, Cerena found a very expensive turkey at a carnicería by her house and it was indeed the whole turkey. It was heavy (9.6kg=21 pounds) and barely fit in the sink.

I had the turkey recipe/instructions, so I volunteered to prepare the turkey. Never again will I ever volunteer for this job. It was disgusting! I felt like I was back in high school biology class dissecting strange animals. I had no idea that the head was still attached the turkey until we took it out of the bag. I said that I would clean the turkey out, but I did not sign up for cutting a turkeys head off! None of us “guiris” had the guts to do it, so Suzanne’s roommate Inma did it for us, which apparently didn’t gross her out at all. She came into the kitchen, took the knife, and sawed the head off at the bottom of the neck.

Then it was time for cleaning the cavities out. I had no idea which cavity was which, or even what a “cavity” was, or what exactly was supposed to be coming out of the turkey. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I closed my eyes, stuck my hand in where Inma cut the head off and started pulling out a whole bunch of squishy stuff that I’m sure were organs, but was too afraid to look. It was the most disgusting thing I’ve even done in my life, and I hope that I never have to do it again. After pulling out everything of both cavities that I thought was supposed to come out (I didn’t know if I was pulling out meat or insides!), I put a chopped onion mixed with fresh herbs in one cavity and an apple in the other. There were still some issues with the turkey, though, like parts of the Spanish turkey that are definitely not part of American Thanksgiving turkeys, like feathers. Why were there feathers still on the turkey?! We looked up online what to do if there were still feathers on the turkey, and everything said that we needed to blowtorch the feathers off the turkey before putting it in the oven, but we didn’t have one, so we just left them on (they were small). The esophagus was also still attached (we think), and everything online said that this part of the turkey, even though it would be difficult to detach, shouldn’t be there. But I couldn’t cut through the bone, so we also left that attached. I rubbed down the turkey with olive oil, sprinkled herbs, salt and pepper everywhere, stuck the turkey neck in a pot of boiling water with onions and garlic on the stove, and then washed my hands for about 10 minutes. We put the turkey in Fernando’s (Suzanne’s neighbor) oven an hour later than planned and were sure it was going to not taste like turkey or catch on fire like in “The Santa Clause.”

We then started making everything else. Cerena and Suzanne worked on rolling the pie crusts and filling while I started preparing the stuffing ingredients. We pretty much took over the kitchen at noon, so Inma went to Fernando’s to make lunch around 4:00 and made lunch for us also. She is so sweet! We took a 20 minute lunch break and then went back to cooking. I baked the stale bread while I sautéed the onions, mushrooms, celery, parsley, and herbs for the stuffing. We then starting peeling potatoes—7 pounds of potatoes to be exact with no potato peeler. We made a quick trip to the store to get more butter, flour, sugar, and some vanilla ice cream while we waited for things to cook. We checked on the turkey at the 3 hours mark and were a little worried about the color—it was still white and people were coming in 2 and a half hours! We rubbed some more oil on it just because, put it back in the oven, and turned up the temperature. At least the turkey smelled good! We came back, cleaned up a little, made the stuffing, mashed potatoes, and sweet potatoes, and then tried to prepare ourselves for the busiest part involved in making Thanksgiving dinner—the last hour.

It was insane. We needed to bake the stuffing, mash the enormous amount of mash potatoes by hand, figure out when the turkey was done, make the gravy, carve the turkey, and welcome all 17 people to our Thanksgiving party all at the same time. We got dressed into our “pretty” clothes and started the “last hour” Thanksgiving dinner process by baking the stuffing and making the mashed potatoes. While Suzanne mashed the mashed potatoes, Cerena and I were running back and forth between Suzanne’s and Fernando’s trying to figure out if the turkey was actually done. We had taken off the foil about 40 minutes earlier so it would cook faster, and checked it around 9:45 or so. It looked done, but how were we supposed to know?? It smelled like Thanksgiving at home, but I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like! Like my Dad told me to do, I stuck a long kebab stick through the middle of the turkey to see if the liquid that came out was clear, but no liquid came out. What did that mean?! I called my Dad while 5 Spaniards watched me freak out over the turkey being done or not. None of them knew how to tell either though. All I knew was that the gravy depended on the drippings from the turkey, and that if the turkey wasn’t cooked enough or was over cooked, there would be no gravy, and that Thanksgiving dinner isn’t really Thanksgiving dinner without turkey and gravy! Apparently the turkey was absolutely done according to my dad, so we pulled it out of the oven and transferred it to the cutting boards.

Then I brought the turkey pan from Fernando’s to Suzanne’s and made the gravy with my mom’s directions in hand. I skimmed the fat off of the top (I think!), scraped the burnt stuff out of the bottom of the pan, and mixed around the liquid while Cerena sprinkled bits of flour into the pan. When it was a good consistency, we put it into the liquid the turkey neck had been boiling in all day after taking out the neck, added some more flour and stirred for about 20 minutes. While Suzanne stirred the gravy, Cerena and I went to go carve the turkey. This has always been my Dad’s job on Thanksgiving. I usually stand next to him to snack on pieces of my favorite part of the turkey (the dark meat) before the turkey gets to the table, but I never actually pay attention to how he carved the turkey. We started with the legs and I was SO happy when we pulled apart the legs that the meat looked both cooked and moist. Like a said, a miracle. We carved the whole turkey in no particular order and with no elegance whatsoever. We mostly used our hands because it was slippery and too hard to use dull knives. Everyone arrived while we carved the turkey and Suzanne was taking plates of turkey to the table while we finished carving because people were starving! I guess that was our fault—we were running about 45 minutes late.

When we finished carving the turkey, all of the other food was on the table and people were sitting down and ready to eat. When Suzanne, Cerena and I were done making sure everyone had everything they needed, we walked into the living room full of our Spanish friends applauding us for all of the food we had cooked. We said a quick “blessing,” which included Tercio and Paco giving thanks for food, for beer and the actual holiday of Thanksgiving without which we would not have made all of this food and have this dinner. We spent the next 4 hours eating and talking and having one of the best if not the best Thanksgiving dinner ever. I don’t like to boast, but I am extremely proud to say that all of the food tasted amazing and just as good as Thanksgiving dinner in the U.S. I am also happy to report that everyone, even Alberto—the pickiest eater of our Spanish friends—loved the food.

I still cannot believe that we made Thanksgiving dinner for 17 people in Spain, and it was “¡buenísimo! There were a lot of things that could have been disastrous, like the turkey, or the fact that we were running way behind schedule, or that the oven we were using to cook everything but the turkey didn’t have any numbers on the dial so we never knew what temperature the oven was, or that all of the measurements from our recipes were in cups, teaspoons and pound (not liters, “cucharaditas,” and kilos), or that fact that we had to light the stove and the oven ever time we used it but ran out of matches, or that the we only had a total of 3 pots, 2 frying pans, and one casserole to cook with and a tiny kitchen to cook in.

Luckily and thankfully, we have the best families ever in the U.S. and the best friends ever in Spain. My mom patiently skyped with me for hours before yesterday explaining each recipe to me in detail, and whenever we had a question or didn’t know what we were doing while cooking yesterday, all I had to do was call my mom or dad and they had a solution. Years of watching Grandma and Mom cook Thanksgiving dinner also prepared me for last night. It’s a good thing Thanksgiving is such an important and coveted tradition in the U.S.!

Our Spanish friends were also amazing and so supportive throughout the day. Originally we thought we were going to have downtime while we were waiting for things to cook so we could eat lunch and rest a little, but we were cooking non-stop for 10 ½ hours. Inma, Alberto (Suzanne’s roommates), Fernando and David kept checking in on us to see how we were doing, making us lunch, offering to make trips to the store if we needed anything or forgot anything, and saying encouraging things like “¡Ánimo!” when we had to do things that we had no idea how to do, like clean the turkey. And Fernando saved us by letting us use his oven to cook the turkey in, because we definitely needed the extra oven space and an oven where we could set the temperature we needed!

All in all, Thanksgiving dinner was fantastic, and I have more to be thankful this year than ever. Of course I missed my family this weekend, but I could not have been happier yesterday cooking Thanksgiving dinner for our friends, listening to Christmas music, spending a night with so many great people, and doing all of this in Spain—a place that will always be a “home” for me.