This year my friend (Heather) asked if I'd like to help with a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for the church. Absolutely! We brainstormed together and planned out the menu. We wrote down the amounts we would need for each recipe and made shopping lists of the 6 or 7 stores we would need to go to in the hopes of finding all of the ingredients.
Since the import store was in Rome I volunteered to get the things we needed there after school. Heather knew they had some American staples that just are not found here, staple things like soft brown sugar, shortening, pickle relish, evaporated milk, cans of pumpkin, etc. I even found a bag, a very small bag, of American marshmallows! I spent about what I usually spend on the entire dinner for less than a dozen items. I was so happy to have these items, that is until I realized I'd be carrying them all the way back home. Fortunately, I had brought a large reusable bag with me that could go over my shoulder along with my backpack from school!
Our first stop on shopping day was for sweet potatoes. They had them, but the price was ridiculous at 6.90 € a kg! I figured I needed about 6 lbs (2.75 kg). We would have spent $23.75 on just sweet potatoes! We thought we'd find them elsewhere.
At the end of our first shopping adventure, we had most of the ingredients, but had not seen sweet potatoes again! A few days later, Heather was able to find them, even cheaper, along with the final items needed.
Then we started cooking. Heather cut up all the things to go into the stuffing, made the green bean casserole, corn casserole, and cranberry sauce.
When I moved to Italy, I did not bring appliances. So I had to ad lib a bit from my normal. I described my egg cooker and Heather realized it was really just a steamer. So we used her three-tier steamer and cooked them all at once! Perfect!
We found french fried onions, not French's, but from IKEA!
Another ad lib: used her bread machine to mix my crescent roll dough. We found out it does not like to do double batches! I had good help! Heather's daughter, Isabella learned very well how to roll them up. But, she forgot to wash her hands afterwards, oops!
Here are 90 crescent rolls all bagged up and ready to go to for the dinner.
When shopping I could only find whole cloves so I had to work a bit extra to have some ground cloves for the pumpkin pie. The 'pie pans' don't have sloped sides here and only two pies would fit in the oven. But, they looked and tasted great!
Sweet potatoes the way my grandpa made them and the corn casserole.
On Saturday morning her husband, Andrea, went to pick up the fresh 30 lb turkey! We were able to fit the bird in the pan and on Sunday morning make it fit in the oven to bake for six hours. It was one of the most tender turkey's I've ever eaten! I made gravy for the mashed potatoes. Early Sunday morning Heather made the mashed potatoes and put them in a crock pot to keep warm. We made the stuffing together.
As we brought in the food, the people at the church started humming the American national anthem for us. It was touching. Thanksgiving Dinner (or pranzo, since it was the mid day meal) was served. Heather shared a bit of the history of Thanksgiving and people enjoyed the experience of our tradition.
