Thanksgiving in Israel

Thanksgiving is my favorite non religious holiday, there was no way I was not celebrating it while I am here in Israel. I planned the menu out in advance and even went to the grocery store a few days early to check out my prospects of getting a turkey. The day I showed up they happened to be doing construction and all of the meat cases were empty, hoping this construction would be over soon, I asked them if they sold turkeys and they assured me they did. I told them I would be back on Tuesday.

Tuesday rolls around and Polina and I head out to do the Thanksgiving shopping. We approached the meat counter and asked for a turkey, not to my surprised he responded saying, "We do usually have them but for some reason this year we do not. You must go to some other supermarket (a bus ride away)." There was no way I was heading to another store. So I decided to take my dad's advice and just buy pieces of turkey. When we asked for this he proceeded to hold up what looked like to me was a 5+ pound turkey just without the skin and legs. Perfect. That was better than a turkey, white meat and no fuss.

I went home and spent Wednesday alternating cooking the turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, apple crisp and studying for my Hebrew midterm. It was quite the day, I have to admit I have never cook a lot of these things on my own but it was an adventure.

I wanted to give the Israelis an "authentic" Thanksgiving, I even found some nice big pine cones to decorate the table with. It turned out to be quite the feast, my American friend Zach and I had a rather traditional Thanksgiving evening and our Israeli friends experienced their first Thanksgiving, they even liked the stuffing which is not something that I am sure they even knew what it was considering I did not really know what it was until I made it.

It was not Thanksgiving at Cousin Susans house, but pretty good none the less.