Thanksgiving in Spain

So I may be back in America, but I haven't given up on finishing my chronicle of my time in Spain, or my time based in Spain when I did a lot of traveling elsewhere. After Rome and before my next trip (Tanger, Morocco) we had four days of classes, including the day before and the day of Thanksgiving. (Thanks to all the Spanish holidays we got off, we couldn't take more time off for American holidays.)

El Día de la acción de gracia turned out to be a huge affair. My roommate and I had decided to have some friends over, since we had a nice-sized apartment and a good kitchen for cooking. I invited a few people, my roommate invited a few people.

And soon half of NYU in Madrid was coming to my apartment for Thanksgiving dinner.

As the days passed by I watched the "attending" count on the facebook event continue to rise. In the end somewhere between 35 and 40 people came over on that Thursday night. Everyone brought food and drink, though, and we ended up having enough of everything for everybody.

Thursday came, with a full day of classes. My roommate and I returned home with a couple of friends in tow who were planning to cook in our kitchen since they lived in homestays and couldn't cook at home. I embarked on  making mashed potatoes without an electric mixer, which I had never done before. But with some help from a friend, I got four kilos of potatoes chopped up nice and small, which meant once I cooked them well, they were easy to mash with a fork. Sour cream was impossible to find, but I added lots of butter, cream cheese, garlic, and salt, and can happily report that the potatoes were a huge hit with no leftovers.

While in the midst of my cooking frenzy, combined with that of Nidhi's guacamole-making and Gus's chickpea salad invention (it was a very diverse Thanksgiving dinner) the turkey crew arrived. No seriously. Our friend Johnny ordered a ten-kilo (about 22 pound) turkey, but didn't have an oven to cook it in. So during the day he and our friend Jeho marinated it in spices and juices and then Johnny and his roommate Neil brought it over to our house around 6:30.

The turkey was almost as big as our oven, but it fit. And then we cooked it for the next 4 1/2 hours. A team of Gus, Patrick, and myself continued to watch over the turkey, turning it and adding more marinade every hour. Somehow, even in Spain, with an oven in celsius, and none of us having cooked a turkey before, we managed to make a delicious turkey that Patrick and Isa carved and everyone enjoyed. We had some random appetizers in the living room which I barely saw as I was so busy in the kitchen, welcoming people, managing coats and whatever food/drinks our guests brought, and making sure we weren't being too loud for our neighbors. It turned out if we could just keep people in the living room with the door shut, it was actually pretty quiet in the hallway outside our door. That was a bit of a struggle in itself, but we didn't get in trouble, so I'd call it a success.

The turkey crew plus Yasmin: Yasmin, Patrick, me, Gus, and Johnny

We managed to have enough food for everyone with plenty of turkey, potatoes, various salads, mac and cheese, stuffing, and dessert - pumpkin pie and apple cobbler with ice cream - for everyone. There was even enough wine and Emily made some rum-spiked hot apple cider that was a big delicious hit.

A good food table, partway through dinner.

Remember Matt from Rome? He came, too, even though the only people he knew were me and Emily. From what I can tell he had a good time and chatted with lots of the NYU crowd, and even stayed until the bitter end helping me and Emily clean up.

Look at how cute we are!

At some point Nidhi and Grace returned from an expedition with a few Spanish friends, so we even had some Spaniards at our dinner.

Heroes of the evening:
Gus for helping with the turkey and being amusing.
Isa for being my sanity and carving the turkey with Patrick and yelling at people when I got frustrated yelling at people.
Emily for doing dishes and helping clean up.
Matt just because it was super cool that he came.
Patrick because he took command of the turkey and answered the door phone when I couldn't and yelled at people to go in the other room when they got tired of listening to me.

All in all, despite my apprehensions at hosting a dinner for an undetermined but certainly large number of people, we had an amazing night. I hardly sat down, but the food was good and it was nice that it was an event that everybody pitched in to create. Nidhi and I may have been left with a lot of dishes and a bit of cleaning up to do, but people actually did a pretty good job not leaving cups or plates around, and we were paid in a week's worth of leftovers. (Emily spent the night and the three of us had Thanksgiving dinner for breakfast around noon.)

 Here we are:

And that's actually not quite everybody. But a successful bunch! So many reasons to be thankful.