Thanksgiving

When the Pilgrims and the Indians sat down for the first Thanksgiving, I’m guessing they didn’t cook a hot meal in the 95 degree spring heat (with no air-conditioning by the way), making trips down to the beach between baking the pumpkin pie and stuffing the turkey. Then again, I suppose they didn’t saddle up on the couch for a game of football or eat cranberry dressing from a tin can.

This is the third year I’ve enforced Thanksgiving upon my husband’s family. I can count on my father-in-law to eat anything I put in front of him. But getting the rest of the crew to eat things like pumpkin pie and sweet potato casserole is a challenge. I know, weird, huh? This presents an additional challenge, because it means I’m left to eat the bulk of the leftovers by myself. Did I mention I work from home? Shane’s sister and her husband lived in the US for five years and understand the tradition. Kym even makes a mean apple pie. And for the first time this year, I got rave reviews on the sweet potato casserole. My mother-in-law now understands that it’s part of the main meal and not a dessert. She also announced that she overate which she never does. So this Thanksgiving thing is definitely catching on.

Preparing a Thanksgiving feast down under presents other difficulties. My first Thanksgiving in Perth I must have visited four major grocery stores looking for things like canned pumpkin and frozen pie crust before realizing it’s just not available and I’d have to go about things the old fashioned way. Under normal circumstances I’m a proponent of cooking from scratch, but a pumpkin pie isn’t a pumpkin pie unless it comes from a can. So, I rolled up my sleeves, boiled and mashed the pumpkin, rolled out the dough and successfully baked a real pumpkin pie and then did it again the next year.

But something magical happened earlier this year. While shopping at a local specialty grocers I came across two (dusty) cans of pumpkin ordered from usafoods.com.au.  I was so excited that I purchased both cans and sat them quietly in the back of my cupboard until this week. It wasn’t until later that I noticed I had spent $7.25 a can. For my crust this year I settled on a sweet flan case, not to be confused with a savory flan case. Aussies love their meat pies but sweet pies aren’t as common and after baking with a frozen flan case for the first time I realized it’s essentially a pie crust.

That’s the anatomy of a pumpkin pie down under. But, I’ve had to make a couple other amendments to my tradition American meal.

Big turkeys are difficult to come by. Thanks to Christmas, frozen turkeys start to appear in the stores at the end of November and for the first year I was able to find a turkey bigger than 5 kilos (11 lbs) to feed 8 adults and 4 children. Our 7.2 kilo bird was more than enough to feed the family with a day or two of leftovers.

But you can’t have a turkey without cranberry dressing and who doesn’t love a big can shaped blob of processed cranberries with ridges. No tin can cranberries in Australia, but thanks to Ocean Spray it comes in a glass jar. And what’s a turkey without cranberry dressing and my apple, sultana and almond stuffing – I mean apple, raisin and almond stuffing.