Thanksgiving Dinner

Hope all of you reading this had a great Thanksgiving!

I think this was my first Thanksgiving that I didn't spend with family. My roommates and I had a Thanksgiving dinner at our house on Saturday. Both of my roommates are also from the States. They teach English at a high school in Prague, and invited some of their Czech students to come and experience a Thanksgiving dinner. Now, I think it would have been stressful enough to try to make Thanksgiving dinner for the first time without my mother, without being in a different country where you can't find the ingredients you would normally use, or, maybe you can find them in some specialty shop, but you have no idea where that would be! Or, you don't know what the Czech word is for the ingredient that you need (i.e., Sage). So we had quite an interesting experience trying to prepare food for over 15 people.

My roommate ordered a 15 lb turkey online from a British shop, and scheduled a time to pick it up. But, when she went to pick it up on Friday, the man in the shop told her they didn't have any more 15 lb turkeys (even though she had ordered one), so she would have to get a bigger one. So she decided on an 18lb turkey, and the man brought it out, holding it up by one drumstick. It wasn't wrapped or anything. She asked if he could please wrap it up, and he did, but he charged her extra for it!

I wanted to make cheesy potatoes- now, as most of you know, I am not a big fan of cooking, nor do I consider myself skilled in this area. Since we don't exactly have the convenience of Cheese Whiz, or a microwave, I attempted to melt a large quantity of cheese in a saucepan on the stove. I grated the cheese first- seemed like the logical thing to do. And I added a stick of butter, minced onion and some sour cream. I needed a can Cream of Chicken soup but we don't have cans of soup here. The cheese never really fully melted. It was very "stretchy." But I thought maybe after I put it over my potatoes and baked it for awhile it would be okay. So I put it all together, put some corn flakes on top and hoped for the best. After about 45 minutes I checked it, and there was a THICK layer of grease on top. I mean, my roommates and I were scooping out the grease with a measuring cup. What I didn't know was the cheese here is about 30% fat. So I could have totally skipped the butter and it still probably would've been a disaster. So, we removed some grease, threw in some more corn flakes, and baked it awhile longer, but it really didn't help. It got a little crispy on the bottom, but the rest was a puddle of grease. So we strained the cheesy potatoes (I will try to post a picture- it was hilarious), and we all tried a few of the crispy bites, but in order to avoid a heart attack, we threw them away. We had a few issues with the turkey as well- it barely fit in the oven- the pan we had to cook it in did not fit in our oven, so we had to improvise. And the ovens are different here- a lot of heat comes from the bottom, but not much at all from the top. We really weren't sure if it was done or not, but the more we cut into it, the better it looked, and it tasted great. Everyone enjoyed it, so overall it was a success!