An Abridged Thanksgiving

November 28^th came and went in Northern Ireland without much more than a yawn from most residents.  However, those expatriates from America (such as us) did our best to celebrate a mini Thanksgiving day feast.  We have known for quite a while that there is no way that we would ever be able to fit a whole turkey in our Euro sized oven.  We started looking around for a substitute fowl, but had a hard time finding pheasant or quail or the like, so we started scratching our heads for another substitution (a chicken seemed to common for a special day like Thanksgiving).  In the recent edition of Everyday Foods magazine, there is a recipe for a stuffed turkey breast with Italian sausage.  We decided our oven could handle that, so we ordered a 4 pound turkey breast (it was so fresh it still had some quills attached!) and a few pounds of Italian sausage from our butcher and bought fresh parsley and sage and went to work on our Abridged Thanksgiving.  We started wracking our brains for what side dishes we could whip up, too.  We don’t have any mixers or pie tins or many of the other kitchen tools here that we have used in years past to make a traditional Thanksgiving meal, which limited the items we could make.  Since we also have an infant this year, and we’re in another country, we decided to cheat a little and buy some store-made items.  While I still made mashed sweet potatoes by myself, we turned to Sainsburys (our local grocery store) for the pre-made cranberry sauce, gluten-free French bread loaf and gluten free deserts.  Two traditional British deserts we added to our menu this year were Christmas pudding (which is not really a pudding at all but more of a spiced bread) and minced meat pies (also deceptively named – the “minced meat” is really currants, sultans and spices).  Dave added some baby potatoes and carrots to the baking pan with the stuffed turkey breast and our feast was ready to eat.  It may not have been the fanciest Thanksgiving that either one of us have ever eaten, but it was one of the more thankful Thanksgivings.  This was our first year with a child for whom we have prayed for a long time, this was our first year with Dave out of school and me on a sort of “sabbatical”, and this was our first year figuring out our way in a foreign land and somehow doing alright at it.  God has truly blessed us to abundance this year, something for which made this Abridged Thanksgiving feeling like our Fullest Thanksgiving yet.

Pre-cooked stuffed turkey breast

The finished product

Our Thanksgiving table, complete with a 4-week old baby