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Happy Thanksgiving
from Antigua, Guatemala |
For weeks we'd been planning Thanksgiving dinner. . .and finally the day arrived. I have to admit it was a very different experience from cooking for the family back in the States. Since in Guate this is not a holiday, our dinner was scheduled for 7 pm.
In the morning Mari and I headed to the market. . ."el mercado," the open air market where we would buy the fruits and vegetables for dinner. Funny, in the US we have a hard time finding good, fresh produce. Here I really wanted canned pineapple for a salad and could hardly find it. I never did find canned pumpkin for the pies, but, thankfully a friend offered me some that her church had brought down! A whole different mind set. . .
When we got home, I started to work. This was the first time Mari has permitted me to cook (otherwise, she fixes EVERYTHING for me, including my breakfast cereal!). It was fun to watch the reactions of the family as I cooked cranberries, chopped raw broccoli for a salad, and combined sour cream and marshmallows for another. I felt a little like a was from Mars. . .many "why are you doing that"s and "I've never seen that before."
The pies were an experience. Mari does not use measuring cups or spoons! I managed to find a baby bottle I have to measure out the milk for the pies, but the crust and other ingredients were measured "by eye." Then, we had trouble getting the oven (yes, the oven of the brand new stove) to stay lit. Then I discovered that the theromstate was set in Celcius, rather than Farenheit, so after a quick trip to the computer for a conversion table, we were set to bake. After a few minutes, though, Mari turned down the oven since she was afraid I'd set it too high. (I wanted to bake the pies for 15 minutes at a higher temperature, and then planned to lower it.) The miracle is, the pies turned out, even if they did need to bake longer than usual! The crust, however, bubbled up and popped! We joined about how appropriate it was to have pumpkin pies with a "volcano" in the middle, since we were in Guate!
The whole family was here, including Mari and Leo's oldest son and his wife, as well as Leo, Jr and his family. Even Pablo came home from medical school. Dick was able to join us, too, so we had quite a full table! As I sat around the table I reflected on how blessed I was to have friends and family here to celebrate with, even if I would not be with my friends and family in the States.
Dinner was a success. Mari cooked the turkey on the "carbon," a sort of barbeque pit/grill, and it was the best I'd ever eaten. I now know how to make sweet potates Guatemalan style (much healthier, and tastier than with brown sugar and marshmallows), and Leo's new favorite is broccoli salad, while Pablo preferred the mandarin orange/pineapple mixture. The hit of the day, though, were the cranberries. The family liked them so much they even put the syrup from them on the whipped cream on their pies.
This was a truly American holiday for us all. Christmas, however, will be celebrated in traditional Guatemalan style, which means a month of celebration. One of the main features of many of these celebrations is firecrackers. . .and I can hear that the neighbors have begun celebrating already!
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