An Australian Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, as it's all about eating. No presents, no church, just food. Lots of delicious foods- turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, stuffing, squash. I do have the snobbish belief that New Englanders do Thanksgiving best- I mean, the first one was celebrated in Massachusetts, after all. I spent three Thanksgivings in Nicaragua- the first year I went to a dinner at the embassy (good!), the second some friends and I cooked up a feast in Esteli with the help of a local bakery and a diesel powered flame thrower (awesome!), and the third was dinner at TGIFriday's in Managua (depressing!).
This year, I had originally considered hosting a dinner but with D in Hong Kong for work I decided I wasn't up to hosting a big dinner myself. I had heard of some Thanksgiving events going on over the weekend, but I want my Thanksgiving on a Thursday, like it's supposed to be, darn it! Luckily my American friend Sofie decided to have a few of us over for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Since she's a vegetarian, I volunteered to do the turkey and made this recipe for turkey hindquarters. It was plenty for the four carnivores in the group and was a lot faster and easier than preparing a whole bird. Plus, I like dark meat and it's less likely to suffer the cardinal sin of turkey roasting: dry meat. We also made stuffing, mashed potato, cranberry sauce (from a jar, alas), green beans and salad. Oh, and very large quantity of wine. The meal came out very well and we all had a lot of fun. Plus, it was sort of neat having Thanksgiving with people who had never celebrated it before- our guests were from Australia, England, and Burma, and were very intrigued by the concept of stuffing. The only downside was having to work the next day.

I'd also like to thank Kelly McMahon for providing the Thanksgiving day laughs...her photo of a cornucopia and invention of the term "pornucopia" on Facebook spawned some hilarious pilgrim-themed porno ideas...sailing on the Mateflower, Pilgrim word-that-rhymes-with Rock, etc...Okay, I'll stop now.

I hope you all had a very happy Thanksgiving!