Giving thanks, NZ style

Thanksgiving isn't much of a holiday here. Which makes sense, given its origins. So when I began planning a Thanksgiving dinner, people just laughed at me..."silly american." But it was my first Thanksgiving away from home and I was determined to get ahold of a turkey for the 4th Thursday in November.

This proved to be a harder task than I had imagined. To begin with, the only grocery store in town is a small market, about the size of a big 7-11. There are two larger grocery stores in some of the nearby towns, but the last thing I wanted to do was lug a frozen turkey home on a 40 minute walk. Luckily, Andy Greene, a buddy of mine from Caltech who is living in Christchurch, came to visit for a few days. And he has a car.

So after buying the biggest turkey in the store (a whopping 11 pounds), we made up a traditional thanksgiving menu and went to the store armed with shopping lists and recipes. We ran into a few snags...like when we went to buy yams and were told that yams are out of season. So we bought kumara instead, which is a fairly common vegetable in New Zealand. I had never heard of it before coming to NZ, and I had never tasted it before the other day, but apparently it's some relative of sweet potatoes. So we just went with it and made the yam recipe...but with kumara instead. And it actually turned out decently...didn't really taste like yams, but I guess if you put enough brown sugar in anything, it can't be SO bad.

In the end, we put together a respectable number of plates - here's the final menu:

Fresh salmon with toasted croustini
Fresh vegetable salad (courtesy of Katie and Andrea)
Ambrosia (Andy's dish I'd never heard of)
Stuffing
Kumara...made to a yam recipe
Turkey and gravy
Mashed potatoes
Ice cream sundaes (by Megan)
Coconut cream pie

So like good Americans on Thanksgiving, we stuffed ourselves until we couldn't move. And then ate some more.

Leftovers have carried me a few days now, and Andy's making a soup from the turkey bones. So hopefully I won't be back to pasta and peanut butter sandwiches for at least a few more days.