Thanksgiving in Mokpo 2008

November 30, 2008

Thanksgiving this year was about as awesome as we could have made it in a foreign country that does not eat most of the foods you consider Thanksgiving foods. We had to hold it a few days late though because none of our schools recognized it as a valid holiday for them. We were lucky to be able to order a decent sized turkey and get some cranberry sauce from The Underground Market, so there were two things set for us to have a relatively normal Thanksgiving. I made a fairly tasty, if kind of gross-looking apple pie (the Korean shortening and flour isn’t quite the same as at home, so it didn’t turn out right), an apple crisp, and a type of candied sweet potato. Cody made two batches of stuffing that turned out pretty well. He wanted to make corn bread stuffing, but we had to resort to baguettes because we couldn’t find corn meal anywhere in this country. We also provided a ton of wine, juice, soda, and stuff for gin and tonics. We actually finished off the whole bottle of gin, they were so good.

We invited probably about 10 other people (who we magically had just enough room for) and they each brought one of two dishes. Abby made some awesome sweet potatoes, Jenns made a fabulous pumpkin pie because his sister had just brought him a huge can of pumpkin. Randi made a sweet potato casserole, and others brought rolls, salad, corn, etc.

The turkey turned out fabulous. I altered Alton Brown’s Recipe for a turkey quite a bit, but I still cooked it the same way, and it turned out fabulous.
Everything turned out pretty awesome, and we all had a wonderful meal. Wim had to leave early because he was pretty sick, but the rest of us hung around and chatted for a long time, and the last person didn’t leave until nearly 10:30 at night. Not long after everyone finally left, Cody and I agreed not to touch the dishes until at least the next day, we put away what we could save, and I went to bed and fell asleep immediately.

Happy Thanksgiving!