So, yesterday was Thanksgiving, my third Thanksgiving in
Rwanda. Thanksgiving 2010 was the first
day of freedom from doctor-ordered bed rest from malaria. I went straight from the clinic to the
Bennetts’ house where I ate like someone who hadn’t eaten for 3 weeks, as I
(someone who had lost 18 pounds from not eating in the previous 3 weeks) felt I
had every right to do. Thanksgiving 2011
was a bit healthier (but not in terms of the food consumed) and also spent at
the Bennetts with 3 turkeys cooked up straight from the backyard and 3 tables
of people celebrating together.
Thanksgiving 2012 was a bit different. The Bennetts and their whole mission were
gone on a retreat, but keeping in step with tradition, I still had Thanksgiving
at their house. I acquired a new sense
of appreciation for the two Thanksgivings before as I played host and cooked a
bit myself.
It was a long, but beautiful day. I work at an international
school. While the highest percentage nationality is American, we are by no
means the majority. The compromise is a
half-day on Thanksgiving Day and the day off on Friday. After the bell rang at noon, I directed a
piano tuner to my house and took psychological tests for graduate school
admissions while he tuned our horrifically out of tune piano. Then Natalie and I packed up our supplies and
headed to the supermarket. Nothing is
closed on Thanksgiving here, so we had no problem doing our shopping right
before doing our cooking. Except that,
as usual, multiple necessary ingredients were unavailable at the supermarket of
our choice… We’ve learned to adapt.
We got to the Bennetts’ house and started to cook around
3. I whipped up 2 good casseroles, and
what should have taken an hour at best took a good 3 hours. We joke about the Pinterest pins that boast
of amazing dishes with JUST 3 INGREDIENTS! and how each of those 3 ingredients
requires a good 10 ingredients here to create a similar effect.
For example, chewy no-bake cookies and cream bars. 3 ingredients: Oreos, marshmallows, and butter. Butter- check! Oreos?- butter, sugar, vanilla
extract (hopefully you brought a year’s supply from the States!), semi-sweet
chocolate chips (maybe you can find a bar of dark chocolate that you can now
cut into tiny pieces), egg, flour, cocoa powder, salt, baking soda,
confectioners’ sugar, milk… and at least 3 hours of work- check! Marshmallows- first ingredient gelatin- not
available in Rwanda, and Pinterest FAIL.
So, back to my casseroles.
I used my mom’s trusty sweet potato casserole recipe. Only 3 of the ingredients posed some
difficulty- can of yams, packed brown sugar, chopped pecans. So, I sent my worker to the market to buy a
kilo of sweet potatoes (which are very dense and white inside) which I baked
for an hour and peeled and mashed for another half hour. I added a little molasses to the raw sugar,
and I substituted almonds for pecans. It
was no mom’s sweet potato casserole, but it tasted all right.
We were going to be lacking in vegetables, so I wanted to
find a recipe to fill that void.
Cauliflower and broccoli casserole.
Perfect. So, again, rather than
grab a bag of frozen California mixed vegetables, I acquired a head of
cauliflower and a head of broccoli from the market. Next, rice, onion, butter. No problem.
And then 1 pound of processed cheese food AKA Velveeta. We don’t exactly have Velveeta readily
available, but we DO have Nouvelle Vache AKA Happy Cow cheese. Google how many grams in a pound: 453.
120g per package, so I bought 4 boxes and I unwrapped 30 portions. I didn’t have to cube it, though, because it
was in nice workable wedges. Cream of
chicken soup- no Campbell’s here! I
heated up some cow’s milk straight from the dairy, added a couple bouillon
cubes and some flour, and oui la! Then
the Ritz crackers. Well, the German
Butchery rarely sells anything with English written on it, but my basic French
told me that Petit Beurre means small butter and that surely those crackers
would suffice. Plus there was a picture
of wheat on the package. Suffice it to
say that my basic French failed me and I ended up with shortbread cookies
instead. Oops! Good thing Barb had an opened package of some
sort of crackers on the counter…
All in all it was a successful meal, albeit a lot of
work! We had chicken, stuffing, sweet potato
casserole, broccoli and cauliflower casserole, corn casserole, fruit salad,
green salad, green beans, saffron rolls, mashed potatoes, rhubarb pie, and
pumpkin pie. The 7 of us ate
approximately 1/3 of the food available which means no cooking for the whole
weekend (as though I would cook anything other than my usual Ramen or fried
eggs, anyway).
Follow a hearty meal with an additional 7 friends and a rousing
game of Taboo, and I’d say it was a pretty successful Thanksgiving.
I am thankful to have a loyal house worker to do my
bargaining at the market and wash the dishes and the floors and my
clothes. I’m thankful for a wonderful
roommate and the company she provided in the kitchen all afternoon. I’m thankful for plenty of food in a land
where many go without. I’m thankful for
friends and fun and a day and a half off to think on what I’m thankful for.
