Thanksgiving

It's Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend, which is a big holiday in my native land.  And, what with my lumberjack shoulders and my fondness for maple syrup, I am a good old Canadian gal and I like to celebrate Thanksgiving.  But there are a couple of problems with this:

1) I live in Europe where they don't celebrate it at all, so trying to get the ingredients you need?  Not easy.   I can actually tell so many stories about trying to buy turkeys that I am going to do a whole separate post on that subject.

2) See above -  you can occasionally get those ingredients because some stores here stock them when Thanksgiving rolls around.  However, that's for American Thanksgiving, which is about six weeks later than the Canadian version.  Try to buy fresh cranberries in Paris in early October?  Ha!

3) I am insane to even attempt to do it here at all - it's so stressful that I only make Thanksgiving dinner every other year because it takes me that long to get motivated to do it again.  Which actually makes it a hot ticket and the parties just keep getting bigger - my last one in London was for 24 people.  A full-on turkey dinner for 24 - you see the insanity, yes?  Thank god I don't know that many people in Paris yet, but there are still 11 people coming for dinner tonight - eek!!!

And this year there is the added stress that I didn't know precisely when I would be moving (which still hasn't happened, btw, and don't even ask me when it will because I don't know - grrr!), so I am not even hosting the dinner in my own home, I had to ask friends to let me do it at their apartment.  So here's the rundown: I am about to go and cook a gigantic turkey, and let me tell you, this is not a nice tidy turkey you buy at the supermarket, this is one that was ordered from the butcher and it's got legs and wings sticking out all over the place, so I actually have to wrestle and tie it into a nice turkey-shaped bundle before I can even attempt to cram it into the tiny Parisian oven I have never used before.  Yep, this should be fun...  I will update you tomorrow on how it went, assuming I don't die of food poisoning before then.