Sun Family in Spain

We celebrated our first major holiday in Spain.  I ordered a turkey from an Irish Butcher, Sol ran all over town to find cranberries and proper brown sugar.  I looked high and low for sage and our other American friends were able to find some, then I found it in an English grocery store and I found fresh sage at the open market in Marbella.  I think I have found almost everything I need now to make most of the food I love, with the exception of Colorado Chiles.  I might have to grow some in pots once we are somewhere where I can plant some pots or a small garden. 

Cooking a Thanksgiving meal in my tiny Spanish kitchen was an exercise in logistics.  We smoked the turkey on our friend’s Ninja grill/smoker.  This tool might be on my Santa wish list sometime in the future. Gluten Free bread is pretty easy to find here so I made bread cubes for stuffing, I bought ground pork and made homemade sausage for the stuffing.  We made Sol’s God Mother’s sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and Sol made pecan pies without corn syrup and used honey and maple syrup instead.  I thought they turned out good but he didn’t like them. Pie crust is a work in progress. The turkey came fresh with a few feathers still stuck in its feet. Poultry often has a few feathers still intact.  I guess when you get poultry that isn’t factory farmed you get a reminder of how it is raised. I have since learned that in the US poultry is rinsed in a chlorine bath before it is packaged. This process is illegal in Europe so instead we get fresh poultry with a few reminders that we are in fact eating a bird. 

It was fun to celebrate a traditional Thanksgiving in Spain with other Americans. We stuffed ourselves, watched football and talked about what we love about living in Spain.

When I was in my 20s I lived in Japan teaching English, we went through the same ritual to find all the Thanksgiving fixings in international markets all over Tokyo and to find someone’s house that had an oven big enough to roast a turkey. In those days we didn’t have google or any efficient way, except through word of mouth, to find international markets. I remember traveling to all the major department stores because they sometimes had international food displays where I could find a jar of cranberries or a special spice. Foreigners living outside their home countries follow this same ritual to keep their traditions alive, share customs and food with new friends and feel a connection to their roots. This is why that new immigrants to any country often set up grocery stores before most other services, having tastes of home makes being far away easier.