So, this is a back post to the holiday. We took the pictures and talked about it, but somehow we didn’t actually manage to post anything.
So, Thanksgiving rolled around, and we wanted to come up with some way to celebrate it.
Problem 1: Our family is all in the United States.
Problem 2: We have a tiny two-burner stove, one medium-sized stew pot, and no oven.
Problem 3: We couldn’t find any turkey, and we probably didn’t have anything large enough to cook it if we could.
(We actually did find a turkey later at a dedicated poultry shop. There weren’t any at the butcher shop.)
So, being dedicated foodies, we hatched a plan to make a Thanksgiving dinner as reminiscent of home as possible. We bought a whole chicken. Then we cut up half a whole wheat baguette that had gone hard and mixed it with sauteed mushrooms, onions, thyme, sage, and butter to make stuffing.
(As a side note, we looked in five stores, trying to find sage. We’d given up when we ducked into the last place, a specialty shop that sold, among other things, Peter Pan peanut butter for €4.50 per jar. It had it. Joy! It didn’t turn out to be GREAT sage. There were still woody stems in it that we had to pick out while we ate, but it tasted great.)
So, we browned the sides of the chicken on the skillet in butter, stuffed it with the baguette stuffing (which turned out to be just the right amount — lucky), and shoved it in the stew pot with about a half-inch of chicken broth. Then we covered and cooked on low for about two hours. The effect was similar to slow-cooking or using a turkey bag. Here’s what our compromise looked like:
Thanksgiving chicken
We will NOT be sorry to trade out the kitchen in this apartment to the larger, nicer one in the UK. Literally only one person can be in this kitchen at a time, and sometimes that’s too many people. Here’s what we were up against:
Our half-chef kitchen
We had the stuffed chicken with boiled new potatoes with butter and salt. I don’t know what kind these potatoes are, but they taste very good that way. And I was skeptical, but Terran was able to get enough drippings to make a nice gravy, though we didn’t have any giblets.
We got to eat this masterpiece while talking to our family over Skype. Dad and I set up a video conference call, and everyone having dinner at my parents’ place had a chance to say hello across the ocean.
In the spirit of sharing food with people, we made some pancakes and gave them to the nice old lady and her husband who we share a clothesline with. We told them in our broken Spanish that today was a holiday in the United States for sharing food with family and friends. Our family was all back in the United States, but we wanted to share some food with them. She appreciated it, and she later told us they were very good.
We also attempted to make chocolate-chip cookies in our toaster oven. This involved finding a recipe that used baking soda, since we couldn’t find baking powder (it later turned up in a huge cannister at a speciality shop, but we didn’t buy it). As we expected, this turned out to be tilting at windmills. You CAN make cookies in our toaster oven, but it heats so unevenly that you can only make them one at a time. After we made a few, we gave up and ate the dough. Ha! No way to fail!
