Thanksgiving Lobster

It's hard being away from home for the holidays, and this was the second year in a row that I've done it. Maybe even the third for Thanksgiving, now that I think about it. But as opposed to last year, when the holiday passed with little fanfare (as evidenced by my Thanksgiving dinner of spaghetti and meatballs) this year was wonderful. All of the American assistants were pining for home and for turkey and for anything made with pumpkin, so we had planned a rather large Friendsgiving in Beauvais, where a lot of assistants live. In the days leading up to it, I tried to talk to my classes about Thanksgiving, but it turns out that I'm a little rusty on my Thanksgiving history (and even if I weren't I don't know that I could fill an hour of class time that way), and concepts like green bean casserole and sweet potato pie don't exactly translate. I asked my students what they knew about Thanksgiving and got pretty much the same answers from one class to another. They offered up turkey, corn, pilgrims, and Indians, but I was a bit taken aback when I had three separate students insist that lobster was a Thanksgiving food as well. I reluctantly wrote lobster(?) on the board and silently wondered where they were getting their information. But after doing some research of my own later on, it turns out that they were right and that I need to reacquaint myself with the first Thanksgiving.

So it was agreed that everyone would bring something to our Friendsgiving, and since all of the Americans were yearning for something -- anything -- pumpkin, I took it upon myself to provide. There is an American store in Belgium that, in general, sells just about the worst America has to offer in terms of nutrition (think marshmallows, Pop Tarts, Chips Ahoy, and the like). But around Thanksgiving, they set up a little display with cranberry sauce, pre-made pie crusts, and my personal favorite, canned pumpkin. I'd stocked up on this a month or so before, so I was ready. I was going to make pumpkin bread, which is incredibly easy, provided you have an oven that works, the right tools, and the right ingredients. But with an oven that never quite heats up the way it's supposed to, no measuring cups or can opener and only one loaf pan (for two loaves), and apparently no ground cloves in all of Europe, the whole thing proved to be a more difficult undertaking.

I did manage to acquire some measuring cups from another American assistant, I eventually (after much googling) managed to open the can of pumpkin without a can opener, and I even sort of made do by smashing whole cloves with the bottom of a glass for the better part of an hour (clove bits flying everywhere). But there wasn't much to be done about the bad oven besides just waiting for the bread to be done, however long it took. As it turned out, it took about two hours. Per loaf. Somewhere in the whole process I also somehow snapped a mixing spoon in half. So all in all, it was more complicated than it should have been, but when I finally went to bed (at 2am) I had two pretty perfect loaves ready to go.

Apparently I wasn't the only one who'd had trouble either. One girl had put herself in charge of pies and was also up half the night trying to make pie crusts in her bedroom with altered ingredients. She told me she'd gone to sleep with flour in her bed.

In the end, though, it was lovely. There were maybe eighteen people there, and we were all worried that there wasn't going to be enough food, but everyone had brought plenty and we all had as much as we wanted. And the best part was that it wasn't just Americans. There were other English assistants from England, Ireland, and Northern Ireland, German and Spanish assistants, and I think one Japanese assistant. So while half of us were feeling nostalgic for Thanksgiving with our families, the others were experiencing their first Thanksgiving ever. They told us how they'd struggled with their culinary contributions (how would a non-American know what green bean casserole is supposed to look like?), and they tried lots of things for the first time. There was so much sharing of culture, and my friend Kayla and I got sort of embarrassingly emotional about the whole thing.

All in all, if I couldn't be with my family, there was no place I would have rather been this Thanksgiving than exactly where I was.

I can't find a picture that has everyone in it, but this is nice too.