Thanksgiving - redneck style

One of the wonderful things about living in Paris that you make friends with other expats.  In my case, the vast majority of my friends here are American.  I've never had American friends before (well, a long time ago there was that gorgeous American boyfriend who looked like a young Elvis Presley...sigh... Ahhh, back in the day Miss K had some game, let me tell you.  Ahem.  Moving on...), which you might think odd, since I'm Canadian and we're national neighbours, but Americans don't really seem to like crossing our border all that much.  I don't know if it's because they think they'll be eaten by moose, or seduced by socialized medical care, or freeze to death in July (because, hey, everyone knows it snows in Canada all year long, right?), but I just never met all that many when I lived in Toronto.  Also not when I lived in London, but in Paris?  The place is swarming with Americans, and may I just say, I am delighted to have made such wonderful, fun, generous, kind-hearted friends. 

So the point of this is to say that the awesome Mr and Mrs Redneck have invited me to my very first American Thanksgiving dinner tonight and I am in a state of excitement akin to a small, hyperactive child on a sugar high on Christmas morning.  Now, if you recall my post about Canadian Thanksgiving last month (thanksgiving), being in a foreign country poses certain challenges for such a celebration, so I can't wait to see what the Rednecks have come up with.  One thing I know they will come up with is a ton of alcohol, so I may not report until my sure-to-be-monumental hangover subsides tomorrow, but there will be a report and I'm betting it's going to be worth reading, because a Redneck Thanksgiving?  This is going to be FUN!

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.

Poverty soup

I think I might have mentioned - oh, just once or twice - how crushingly expensive Paris is?  Well, I really noticed it on my recent trip to London, when I kept thinking how reasonable the prices were there.  Yes, IN LONDON.  I seem to have this unnervingly accurate gift for moving to cities just as they become the most expensive in the world - I'm sure if I moved to Bangkok tomorrow the cost of living would shoot up just to spite me.  

But Paris used to be cheap - I have recently been reading A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway, which is a memoir of his time in Paris in the 1920s.  It's hugely entertaining and I am enjoying it greatly - in fact, I only occasionally allow myself to dip into it because I don't want to finish it.  He writes a great deal about how it was to be a poor writer in Paris and it makes me laugh because he truly had no idea.  Um, Ernie?  If I may call you that?  You are not poor if you can afford to rent an extra hotel room just to write in.  You are not poor if you are writing in a café where you can afford a café au lait, two rum St James, a dozen oysters and a half carafe of wine.  Even in the 1920s, that ain't poor.

Let me tell you about poor, Ernie.  Poor is when you are at the grocery store trying to figure out what you can buy for a euro, because that's all you have.  Answer: a large tin of chickpeas (which I loathe unless they are in hummous, but really, what doesn't taste good with enough garlic and lemon juice?), for 77 centimes.  What to do to make the horrid things into a palatable meal?   Well, I foraged in my kitchen cupboard for whatever ingredients were already there, and I give you my recipe for Poverty Soup:

2 onions and 3 cloves of garlic - chop and sauté until golden
3 cups chicken stock - made from cubes (use what you like, that's what I had)
1 large tin chickpeas, drained
1 tin crushed tomatoes
1 tin coconut milk

Mix it all together in a large pot and heat, then puree.  Add salt, pepper, curry powder and tabasco (or whatever seasonings you like, that was all I had) until you can choke it down. 

So there you go, Poverty Soup - it actually ended up being (much to my surprise) quite tasty and that recipe makes about 2 litres, so you will have lots of leftovers for the freezer.   Hey, in these credit-crunchy times, I thought I might as well share the recipe...