Among expats, celebrating Thanksgiving is important. How to find our traditional Thanksgiving ingredients is discussed in many blogs, Facebook groups, and YouTube videos.
We don’t have a big enough oven to cook the 17-lb turkey we used to prepare. We don’t have the Pepperidge Farm bag of cornbread stuffing. There are no fresh cranberries. And we are not pie bakers and don’t own a pie plate yet anyway.
Our Thanksgiving plans fluctuated. At first we were going to the mountains to visit with some friends we met in the summer, but our host had to cancel. Then we got an invitation to another friend’s Thanksgiving celebration. He is a gourmet cook and went all-out to make several wonderful traditional foods, including a perfect, tender turkey and a deep-dish pumpkin pie.
We still wondered how we might make our own traditional foods, so in the weeks before Thanksgiving we explored the markets to find the ingredients we needed.
Stuffing
Stuffing is a tricky one. We’ve always used 2 or 3 bags of Pepperidge Farm cornbread stuffing. When we thought we were on our own for Thanksgiving, we did some research on making stuffing without the Pepperidge Farm bag. We chopped up our more-than-day-old wheat bread and toasted it dry; we added sage and garlic. I forgot to get celery in the big grocery and there wasn’t any in the local little grocery, so I added peas and corn, and for complexity I chopped up a couple of figs. For the broth, I found bouillon cubes and powder at the natural foods store that seemed more wholesome that the usual chemical ones. Boxes of broth are not a thing. (I suppose I could make stock.) So the stuffing came out earthy and interesting and could have been more moist, but it wasn’t Pepperidge Farm cornbread stuffing. I’ll try again sometime.
Pumpkin Fig Quick Bread
I spent some time finding ingredients for the pumpkin fig bread I have sometimes made. The Portuguese word abóbora, means both pumpkin and squash, and I haven’t seen any canned pumpkin or any bright orange pumpkin-shaped vegetables. There’s a orange-brownish squash that has a flat pumpkin shape. You can buy packaged already-cut hunks of it in the grocery.
It took a while to find dried figs, and now I find them everywhere, at least in larger stores. Whole cloves were available, but ground cloves were hard to find until when we went to the largest French-owned grocery and found ground cloves alongside the whole ones. I could have solved the problem by buying a spice grinder, I suppose.
I think my new result tastes similar to my past versions, except that I marinated the figs in white port, instead of expensive imported rum. There might be a store devoted to liquors that would have less expensive rum, but maybe it is always imported from the New World.
Cranberries for Relish or Bread
No fresh cranberries to be found here, although I can sometimes find very nice dried cranberries for my breakfast granola. My fresh-berry cranberry-orange relish wouldn’t be the same. I could make the cranberry orange bread with rehydrated dried cranberries, I suppose. They already have sugar added, so the tang of the fresh wouldn’t be there.
We’ve heard rumors of small amounts of cranberries being available at various markets. The advice is to go to the market early and grab them if you see them, because they won’t be there for long.
I liked this article about the countries where cranberries are grown. They are grown in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, but the difference in quantities grown in Europe versus the United States and Canada is dramatic.
Sweet Potato Sauce
David looked for some of the ingredients for the rather complex sweet sauce he used to make for sweet potatoes. Years ago, it started out as whiskey sauce, but it evolved to include banana liqueur, Aperol, coffee powder, and various other subtle flavorings. (Find the secrets here.) It seemed excessive to stock up on all the liqueurs just to make this sauce. We did find coconut creme and banana liqueur and grabbed them for future use.
Chocolate Truffles
Back in Massachusetts, we would get Whole Foods chocolate truffles, which were always devoured at the Thanksgivings we hosted. So, we found chocolate truffles here, at El Corte Ingles! It’s a Spanish chain specializing in high-end and imported food items. The truffles were even in the same shape box. We didn’t need to eat them though (they have calories, I’ve heard). We brought them as a hostess gift to our dinner. We’ll find out if they taste as good another time.
I need some food pictures for this post! We didn’t take any.