Thanksgiving in Spain

I know it’s well past Thanksgiving but I’ve been slacking on the blog posts and thinking back, Thanksgiving here does deserve a mention. One of my roommates is an Auxiliar at a culinary arts school and when Thanksgiving was coming up one of the teachers there offered to make traditional American Thanksgiving food for her in one of his classes. He said he would make a bunch that she could take home and then we could have a dinner here. She decided we’d have a Thanksgiving party and we invited around 25 people, although sadly only about half them showed up. In fact we ate Thanksgiving food for over a week after and then finally had to throw some out because we were worried it was getting too old. I ate sweet potatoes for every meal for about 5 days, I’m surprised my skin doesn’t have an orange-ish tinge these days.

My roomie gave the teacher some recipes, and others he looked up himself, and then the class cooked us food. We then invited other Americans we knew as well as some people who had never celebrated Thanksgiving, Spaniards, Germans, Bolivians etc. The class made us 2 turkeys, 2 bags of mashed potatoes, 2 bags of sweet potatoes, 2 bags of green beans, 2 bags of stuffing and one bag of gravy and one bag of cranberry sauce. I say bags because they literally gave it to us in sealed plastic bags. It was very very strange looking. We squished the food out of the bags and served it in mix-matched bowls that probably date back decades and we had people bring beer and wine and we had a feast/party/gathering.

I’m not a huge fan of Thanksgiving food as it is but here’s my verdict on the food. The turkey was quite good, not too dry at all; the gravy, although I never eat gravy, was good; the cranberry sauce was suuuuuper tart but tasty in very small dosages; the green beans were gross because I hate green beans (I even gave them a try this time, but still gross); the sweet potatoes were really good because they weren’t too sweet, and the mashed potatoes weren’t at all like what we eat at home; they were exactly like Spain’s puré de patatas which don’t taste like they come from real potatoes. Well, don’t get me wrong, they were good, they just tasted a bit like instant mashed potatoes and they had no lumps at all and an oddly smooth texture. The stuffing was nooooothing compared to Nana’s stuffing (which I missed!) but it was good, even though in true Spanish style they added ham to it.

All in all it was a success, I explained the history of Thanksgiving which I had only really learned a few days before when I had to teach classes about the holiday to my students (slightly but not completely sarcastic comment). I told our dinner guests about what it means to “give thanks” or “be thankful” a concept which was completely over the heads of all of my students but our friends seemed to get the gist of it. There isn’t even really a Spanish translation for being thankful. The highlight of my classes was when I made my 16-year-olds trace their hands and draw turkeys. Some came out so terrible I lost my composure in class and laughed so hard I cried and brought up the worst ones to show the whole class. Really professional, I know. Anyway, besides our leftovers lasting forever, Thanksgiving is not such a distant memory because I just finished scrubbing the spilled wine off the floor yesterday. I would say we did our cleaning in stages, food that will go bad being first, empty booze bottles second, moving chairs and tables back third, and finally cleaning the obscenely dirty floor. So yes, our apt looked a bit like a Sunday after a house party for about 2 weeks. Although I did a lot of cleaning, I am thankful that the cleaning lady who comes monthly is coming tomorrow before my parents arrive!