Thanksgiving, for real

This past Sunday we finally took time to celebrate Thanksgiving with two other American couples (one half of each couple is a postdoc in Geology, if that makes sense). It was also our turn to host this group, as we've had dinner at each of their places. We decided to start off the day with an informal Turkey Trot, since we're a sporty bunch. So after an hour-long run through the Schönbuch, I got to work cooking.

This was the first time we'd hosted a Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, our first Thanksgiving as a married couple. It's kind of a big step in the evolution of my pseudo-hausfrau identity. I used to really like to cook, so in theory I should be more excited about this milestone, but something about writing a dissertation made me go numb to enjoyment of activities such as cooking. During the writing, it was much more important that food was had than that food was made or enjoyed. However, I managed to shake off some of my numbness toward cooking and other forms of this thing called "relaxation" and get excited enough to make up a real shopping list and look up real recipes on the internet.

All was going well on Sunday afternoon as I was preparing delicious stuffing, completely from scratch, of course, because stuffing mix doesn't exist here. I then made a very delicious green bean casserole, also from scratch, as Campbell's cream of mushroom soup to my knowledge is an American phenomenon. Then it was time for the turkey. I called Joe in to help clean out the icky bits, but as Joe was wrist deep in fowl he discovered our turkey was not a turkey. I grabbed the dictionary and realized that what I'd thought was the frozen turkey display (for Thanksgiving) in the grocery store that sells American food was actually the frozen duck display. Oops! As you might know, turkeys and ducks are very different. In fact, ducks have quite a bit more fat. So instead of cooking my first Thanksgiving turkey, I ended up cooking my first duck. Very fortunately, our European convection oven comes with a long skewer that rotates, so the duck was cooked to perfection, and all it's fat dripped off into the special duck-fat collecting pan that also fortunately comes with European ovens.

Other than the duck snafu, everything went well, and we rather enjoyed our feast, complete with a Japanese pumpkin pie and hand-whipped cream, vegetarian wellingtons and glühwein (German mulled wine consumed during the Christmas season). We finished off the night with a game of Die Siedler von Catan (Settlers of Catan). Erfolg! (Success!)

It's also worth a mention that we went on Saturday to our first Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) with some visiting scientists and folks from my lab group. The market was at our local castle, Hohenzollern, which we've been to before. The actual market wares were kind of a bust, but we did get to try a lot of Glühwein and other hot toddies. My favorite part was eating the likeness of St. Niklaus in baked form, complete with a pipe.