Happy Belated Thanksgiving!

Hello everyone! I'm definitely overdue for an update, so here goes...

This past Thursday, as promised, we celebrated Thanksgiving in the piso with a FEAST for 11 people! We didn't decide on what day to celebrate it until late Wednesday night when the grocery stores were closed, so I was feeling especially unprepared that evening before I went to bed. I was up til like 3 in the morning boiling eggs for my deviled eggs and calling my mom and various others for help with recipes. When the morning arrived (very quickly, might I add), I headed off to work, already very excited for all the food I was going to be preparing. Luckily for me, I finished work at 11 and got to leave early with one of the teachers who was also finished for the day. If I hadn't been able to do that, the meal would've been a massive disaster!

As soon as I got home, I changed clothes and went straight to the grocery store to pick up all the stuff I needed.  Finding that the first grocery store didn't have everything I needed, I came back to the piso, dropped off all my stuff, and went to the other grocery store to get the remaining items. As soon as I got back from my second trip to the store, I started cooking around 2:00.

First, I prepped the chickens since they had to sit in the fridge to marinate for a little while before I cooked them. By the way, I was so surprised to find that you can buy whole cleaned chickens at the grocery store for 4euros! Very cheap and lots of food...gonna have to start cooking them more often! But anyway, I used a recipe that my friend Kelli had recently told me about...super easy and the result is really good! All I did was chop up some cloves of garlic and then lift up the skin of the chicken, rub it around, and leave it there. Once I had put garlic under all of the skin, I put some cloves inside the chicken (whole or diced...doesn't really matter) and also some wedges of lemon. Lastly, I squeezed some lemon juice on the outside of the chicken and put it in the fridge to marinate for a few hours.

After I had the chickens out of the way, I started doing a little bit of everything...peeling eggs, snapping green beans, peeling sweet potatoes, chopping onions, peppers, celery, and mushrooms for various dishes, etc. A couple hours in, Martín's girfriend, Raquel, came over to help me chop, peel, and do whatever other odd jobs I needed help with.

The first thing to be finished were the deviled eggs. Second, were my green beans. I made them from an old Grandma Mac (my Mom's mom) inspired recipe--green beans, steamed with onions and small pieces of bacon. Deeeelish. After I finished the green beans and boiling the sweet potatoes it was already like 6:30, so I decided it'd be a good idea to get going on the cooking of the chicken.

That sounds like an easy task, but it was actually a whole lot more complicated than I had hoped since our oven doesn't really work. It heats from EITHER the top or the bottom, but not both. Endika had tried to cook a chicken in it before and it failed miserably, so I knew I wasn't going to be able to rely on our piece-of-crap oven. Since Raquel lives only like 2 minutes away from us she offered to let me use her oven. Thank goodness or I would've been screwed.

So after removing the sweet potatoes, and getting the regular potatoes boiling, I ran the chickens through the street to Raquel's piso on a baking pan. I covered it in foil to avoid strange looks from the neighbors and people in the street haha. I tossed it in the oven at Raquel's and she agreed to keep an eye on it. Then I ran back to the piso as fast as I could since my potatoes were still boiling. They were done right when I got back and so I started work on the garlic mashed potatoes. Didn't take too long to get those looking and tasting good!

The rest of the cooking is all pretty much a blur. At some point, when Tomás got back from class, he told me he would go to the store for me to buy paper plates, water, drinks, bread, etc, so on his way, I sent him to Raquel's with my bits of thinly sliced turkey breast smothered with garlic, onions, green peppers, mushrooms, and olive oil, as well as my sweet potato casserole. The turkey dish was my own creation. I just made it up so that I would at least have something with turkey in it to serve since it was a Thanksgiving feast, and no Thanksgiving could POSSIBLY be complete without turkey. When I found the bits of turkey breast, I decided not to go with the turkey leg idea that I mentioned in my previous post since I figured the legs would require more time to cook since they're thicker. The sweet potato casserole was an adaptation of a recipe from my brother, Ben, that I had to adjust since Spain doesn't have brown sugar or molasses (from which apparently, I could've made my own brown sugar). The topping was the only part that required brown sugar, so I was able to make do without it. Also, I had to use almonds for my topping instead of the traditional pecans, since I don't think they have pecans in Spain either.

Somewhere in the mix and rush of things, I managed to finish up my homemade stuffing and and corn on the cob. People started showing up around 9 (more or less on time for once...Martín says they only showed up on time because it was to eat...if it were for anything else they would've been AT LEAST a half hour late haha). Fran and Raul were the first to show up and they brought the beer with them. I insisted that the only beer that we drink would be BUDWEISER hahahaha. Only AMERICAN beer for my AMERICAN dinner celebrating a very AMERICAN holiday.

The last thing that we had to do was run over to Raquel's and get all the goodies from her oven. When we entered the piso, I was surprised and EXTREMELY pumped at how good everything smelled. We debated for about 5 minutes about how we were going to get the chicken back to the piso without spilling all the juice out of the pan, and eventually, Tomás just ended up carrying the tray with two towels and walking reallly slowly. This time we didn't cover the food and it was HILARIOUS to see the looks we were getting while walking through the streets with plates full of food. I wish I had had a camera and a free hand to take pictures of Tomás with the chickens!

Much to my surprise, I finished up with everything relatively on time, and all the food was on  the table around 9:30. After taking pictures of all the dishes, I said a short prayer in English, translated it for them, and then we dug in! I've posted some pictures of how it turned out below. Click on the pictures to enlarge them if you'd like to inspect more closely the deliciousness of all the food I prepared :)

The whole crew: (L to R) Tomás, Cheti, Jose,
Fran, Juanmi, Raul, Endika, Martín, and Raquel
(not pictured Noelia)

The crew with the COOK! I didn't know our ping-pong
dinner table expanded to seat 11! I'm gonna have to
start expanding it so I can win at ping pong hahaha

Corn on the cob, deviled eggs, and
green beans with onions and bacon

The main course, lemon garlic chicken!

 Baked turkey breast with mixed vegetables,
homemade stuffing, and garlic mashed potatoes!

Much to my surprise EVERYTHING turned out really well. Everybody ate the deviled eggs first while I was getting the rest of the stuff on the table, and they were a big hit. A few people even told me that the eggs were their favorite thing that I made. The stuffing was really good too and was one of the first plates to be empty. I was proud and surprised at how much my homemade stuffing actually tasted like the Stove Top kind. All I did was toast some bread in the oven, chop it up into little squares, sauté some onions, celery, and mushrooms, mix it all together, then add a little bit of chicken broth to soften up the bread, and then bake it. Really simple, not very time consuming, and much more impressive than saying that you used a box of stuffing mix!

One thing that didn't surprise me was that no one was too crazy about the veggies. Hardly anyone was even brave enough to try the green beans. I made Tomás try them and he didn't like them. Noelia, however, said she LOVED them and since I had so many left over, I sent her home with a whole tupperware full of them (I had a full one too!). The corn was more liked than the green beans, but overall, everyone was more interested in the other foods. Endika was surprised when I served the corn on the cob the way that I did--boiled then topped with butter, salt, and pepper--because he says his mom makes it that way and whenever he prepares it, everyone else thinks it's really weird. Apparently Basques and Americans like to eat their corn on the cob the same way...who knew? 

The garlic mashed potatoes were really good but they didn't really catch anyone's attention since they're less out of the ordinary here. My favorite part was actually the turkey which is strange since I usually prefer the sides. I was surprised because I totally just threw random vegetables on top of the turkey in hopes that it would produce a good flavor and sure enough it did. At first I wasn't sure that people liked it because there was lots of it left in the pan, but then next time I looked at the pan, it was all gone, so at least one person liked it haha. 

Out of all the things I prepared, my least favorite was the chicken. Don't get me wrong, it was still actually really good, but I think it was the fact that it didn't really blend with the other flavors as well as I would've hoped. The lemony-ness of it made it stand out from the other dishes. Since I didn't prepare any gravy, I knew I would have to give the chicken a stronger flavor, but I think lemon was the wrong route to choose. Something that might have blended better would have been maybe a rosemary basil chicken. But oh well, it got eaten and everyone liked it, so maybe I'm the only one who noticed that it didn't fit in!     

And now, here comes the bad part of the story. When we left Raquel's with all the food, my sweet potato casserole still wasn't crispy on the top like it was supposed to be. So, bravely, I decided to toss it in our oven to let it finish up, slash to keep it warm. I kept checking on it every few minutes or so, and it was not getting any crispier. So, I decided to move it up a rack to get it closer to the heat that was coming from the top of the oven. Naturally, I got sidetracked by eating and forgot all about it after that. It was only when Tomás went into the kitchen to grab something that he reminded me that my dessert was in the oven. Oops. Pulled it out and sure enough, the top of it was blackkk.

As you can probably imagine, this was quite disheartening. Everyone was enjoying all the food so much, and the buildup for the dessert was huge as no one here had ever heard of making a dessert with sweet potatoes, or as they're called here, boniatos. Also, when preparing the sweet potatoes, I, too, was super excited because I kept tasting it, and it was delicious. I was so proud that it was turning out so well as I was totally ad-libbing the recipe. When I opened up the oven to see my beautiful creation ruined, I literally almost cried. The dessert was supposed to be the grand finale.

My burnt sweet potato casserole :'(
as you can see, it still got eaten haha

But anyway, everyone was really nice about it, and luckily, the topping--a mixture of almond slices, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg--was the only part that got burnt. It was super easy to peel off the black part and underneath everything was fine. Raquel actually told me that despite the fact that it got burnt, it was her favorite part of the meal, and she wants me to teach her to make it! Of course I would've liked for the dessert to have come out perfectly, but I suppose I can't really complain as that was pretty much the only thing that went wrong the whole evening.

All in all, after 7+ hours in the kitchen, my Thanksgiving dinner turned out WONDERFULLY. Everyone was super complimentary and the roommates told me that they were VERY shocked haha. They kept asking me, "Wait a minute, have you just been pretending not to be able to cook this whole time?" hahahahhah

All the excitement that I had all day was definitely worth it, and I'm not gonna lie, I really made myself proud. Not only did I prepare an entire Thanksgiving dinner BY MYSELF, but I did it for 11 people and nearly everything was super legit. Another thing that I was surprised about, was that I actually got the timing nearly perfect. Everything finished up right around 9 and the parts that I had finished before nine were easy to reheat and get on the table with the rest of the food. Overall, I've gotta say, GREAT SUCCESS! (Borat voice haha). I think I made America proud :)

Lastly, I had forgotten how good Thanksgiving leftovers are! It's currently Monday, and I haven't cooked since Thursday. I swear the food keeps getting better everyday haha. Unfortunately, today will be the last day for leftovers, as they're nearly gone now. DAMN. 

Hope everyone's Thanksgiving was as good as mine and that you're enjoying all the Christmas spirit that I'm sure has filled the neighborhoods, stores, tv and radio stations, etc. I'll be updating again soon as we've got a holiday til Wednesday and I'll have a bit more free time for updates. I still haven't finished writing about my volleyball team, so I'll get that update to y'all soon!