Forgive me for the length - I've had DAYS to think of stuff to add. Enjoy!

The best Spanish Thanksgiving EVER!!!!

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday; I would even say my favorite day of the entire year. It is hard to be away from my family around this time. I was prepared to be sad this year like I have in the past when I couldn’t get home. What I got was something I never could have dreamed up. An American girl (Julia) and an Irish girl (Frieda) and I ended up banding together to attempt a dinner party. None of us had ever put on a dinner like that, but we figured that if we all pitched in we could come up with something. So, after several calls to mothers around the world, we picked Frieda’s house to host the event because she’s the only one with an oven and has the most space. Can you even imagine transporting a turkey down the road, ha – without a car. A couple days before, we all starting calling dibs on who could make what food. I said that if someone could cook the turkey, I could search one out. A whole turkey is not a super easy item here to find in small-town Spain. Luck would have it that a teacher I work with found out I was looking for one. She was dropping me off after school on Wednesday and took me right to the door of the open-air market. She even told me what door to enter and which stand to go to and to talk to a man named Manolo. I walked straight in and said to the man, “I’m looking for a turkey”, he said, “I have a turkey”, I said, “A whole one?” All he had to do was nod his head for a great big smile to appear on my face. He actually had two, big and bigger. Our dinner had a guaranteed guest count of 3…us. So of course I bought the 7.4 kg bird…the 16 lbs turkey. I also bought a box of freezer bags so I could eat turkey until next year.

We all work until early afternoon on Thursdays, so we decided to serve dinner Spanish style, at 9 or 9:30 pm. This meant I ran to Frieda’s house after school so we could get the bird in the oven by 3pm. And so began the experiment. We cleaned the turkey and got it in the oven. Set the timer for twenty minutes so we could adjust the heat as we had been instructed. So far so good. We then made note of the clock on the wall so we knew when to baste the bird. I left to wash up and get food from my house so I could be back in time for Julia to leave and give an English class. When I got back to Frieda’s an hour or so later she had a slightly funny look on her face and asked if Julia had gotten a hold of me. Apparently, when the timer ran out after those first twenty minutes, the oven shut off with it. Oops. So, I’m not sure exactly how long it was off, but we adjusted and figured dinner might be a couple minutes later going on the table. As a couple of hours passed, our bird didn’t look like it was cooking. This is when the first SOS call went out. The Irish mama got the call. She pulled herself out of her sewing class when her mother’s intuition told her the phone call might mean the turkey needed her help. So, again, we adjusted and figured dinner might be a couple minutes later going on the table. As the afternoon went on, we had several people call and say they couldn’t make it to dinner. We then proceeded to encourage guests to bring friends.

Arrival time of guests: 9:30pm. As time got closer, we needed to check the turkey to see if it was done. We didn’t have the pop up timer and we didn’t have a meat thermometer. What we did have -- two intuition-based, mother-recommended tests to “just know”. Seeing that our turkey intuition was in its first year of development and all mothers were several countries and/or an ocean away, we were going to have to wing this one. One test said the turkey was done, the other one said it wasn’t. We decided that it could use a little more time. Around this time, there were a few more food-stuffs to wrap up. On the stove we got the potatoes cooking and Frieda was working on her bread stuffing. Irish mama had told her she would need to use approx. 12 pieces of bread and that when properly mixed it should ‘be dry, but stick in your fingers and easily crumble out”. At piece number 16 she was starting to question the process. At closer inspection, the potatoes weren’t cooking at the desired speed. At even closer inspection, this was because they weren’t cooking. The breaker for the stove and oven blew from being overloaded. We turned everything off that was unnecessary and the breaker then blew about 10 more times. We adjusted and figured dinner might be a couple minutes later going on the table. We looked at the turkey again and decided that test number one was passing with flying colors and that test number two was never going to happen. Mr. Turkey needed to come out of the oven so he could sit and we could make the gravy. At this point the guests were trickling in and starting to chat. I had to pull Julia and Frieda away for a moment to get help pulling the turkey. A little while earlier they decided they should start sampling the wine to make sure it was suitable for the guests’ consumption. It was then suggested I find someone else to help me take the very HOT, very HEAVY turkey out of the oven. I agreed that would be a smart idea. Luckily, there was a very helpful Spanish guy up for the job. So, we continued with the loose ends. We turned the oven off to leave some electricity for the stovetop and little by little started to put the food on the table.

Final guest count: 8 – 3 American girls, 1 Irish girl, 1 Belgian girl, and 3 Spanish guys. Everyone gathered around the table and dinner was served at 10:30. We ended up with the juiciest turkey we could have asked for, mashed potatoes with the perfect consistency, gravy with the perfect flavor without anything extra added in, Irish stuffing that was the first thing to go, and so much more. Not only did we have edible food, we had DELICIOUS food. I couldn’t help but smile. The joke at my family’s Thanksgiving is that I can’t cook and thankfully I’m getting at least one good meal for the year. Well folks, looks like all I had to do was move to another country and get some international assistance to learn. It was the most amazing family meal. I was a quarter way around the world from all of you and I didn’t feel lonely. Everyone’s excitement was incredible. One of the Spanish guys (Jesús, yes, this is really his name) was like a little kid at Christmas or in a candy shop, maybe even a little kid in a candy shop at Christmas just because he was invited and got to be a part of the festivities. The funny thing is he wasn’t actually one of our original guests. We had invited some people from our favorite bar/restaurant (it’s called Etiqueta negra) and he stopped in there. They mentioned the party. He then nonchalantly called Frieda to say hello and ask “how she was doing”. She said we were cooking dinner and invited him to join. He said he’d be delighted and he’d be right over. She hung up the phone, took two steps, and the doorbell rang. Low and behold it was him. I can only imagine him standing outside of her door waiting for the invitation. And Frieda had no clue what Thanksgiving was about, but threw herself into it. She made sure we had candles and atmosphere. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. We didn’t call it a night after dinner, either. Around 12:30 Frieda and Jesús went downstairs to Etiqueta negra to check on our friends and see when they would get out of work. He went running around the bar showing everyone that would pay attention the photos he had taken of the party so far and of him so very proudly holding the finished turkey on a platter. What they probably didn’t notice in the photo was me “assisting” him in holding the turkey because I was so paranoid he was going to introduce it to the floor before we got to eat it. And Giselle, (an American whose parents are from El Salvador), invited some of her Spanish friends over after they left their Thursday night out with a group of teachers (this is the same group I usually join every week). They arrived around 2am, bringing another group of characters to join the mix. We talked and played games until we sent the last person home at 4:30. Frieda and I then crawled into bed at 5am, but not before we had one last turkey snack.

The festivities didn’t end there. Julia and I stayed at Frieda’s house the whole weekend and the other girls kept coming back to visit. Friday we had another mini Thxgiving dinner, Saturday we had turkey sandwiches, and Sunday we opted for pizza. I’m pretty sure we remade the Irish stuffing three times. Yummm. Every moment of the day has been recounted at least twice, the good parts 3 or 4 times. I can’t tell you how much I have laughed and smiled in the last 4 days.

I have SO many photos. I’ll include a few so you can get a feel for how it all turned out. I hope you all had a fraction of the day that I had!! Love and miss you.

Besos, Haley