My Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!! I hope that everyone had a great day and shared it with good people. As for what we did here, well we tried to recreate Thanksgiving as best we could. Everyone in the region came to the regional house to help celebrate. We couldn’t get a hold of any turkey so we bought 10 chickens and 5 ducks. Luckily we had more than enough people willing to kill the animals (frustrations with work and people run high!) so I was spared that task. On Thanksgiving Day we were told to pick a bird and season it, so I head to the cooler and pick out a nice juicy chicken. I took it out of the bag and noticed that one of the guys was nice enough to clean out the insides but to my surprise they did not remove the head nor the feet. So what is a girl to do but grab a meat cleaver and behead the bird herself!! After a few whacks my dinner was no longer starring me in the face. I then proceeded to season the bird and let it marinate. Throughout the day it felt like a real Thanksgiving because there was a lot of food preparation and delicious smells coming from the kitchen. At about 3 pm the guys started throwing the birds on the grill as our final food prep. Around 5 pm everything was done and we had a LOT of meat, green bean casserole, mashed potatoes and gravy (I can say that I had a hand in the gravy, but it was just adding hot water to McCormick gravy mix), sweet potatoes, stuffing, biscuits, pumpkin pie, apple pie, and chocolate pie. Now, everything sounds really authentic but I can tell you that all these dishes had a bit of a twist on them, but we did the best we could with what we could find here. After stuffing ourselves silly we did what any other family would do and napped!! Then we played a fun game called Pit which was explained to us as a commodities exchange game with a bell!! I know it sounds like “What the???” but it was actually a lot of fun. After hanging out some more it was time to call it a night and head off home. All in all it was a fun day and we all got a little taste of home.

Starting the preparations for Thanksgiving dinner. Please not the beheaded duck with it's feet off too, that's what I did to my chicken!!

The chickens marinating, some people were inventive and came up with Thai peanut marinade!!

If you think making Thanksgiving dinner in the States is hard, try doing it with no running water and three burners working on the stove. Here some of the girls are helping out by washing dishes so we can continue cooking!

Everyone chilling while things cook and bake.

Here I can contributing my culinary skills by making the gravy :)

The boys grilling up the chickens!

Yummy looking chickens!!

We're about ready to start feasting!!

Everyone sitting down at the dinner table with their plated piled high. Mine's the blue one with everything swimming in gravy. I LOVE gravy!!!

And here is a great picture of one of the volunteers in an after eating food coma, we invited our cleaning lady with her son to come and I guess he picked up the after food coma tradition too!!!