We actually missed Thanksgiving day because it is a normal work day here. So we shifted our celebration to the following Saturday. The second adaptation is the main course. Whole turkey see hard to get here. One year we bought a selection of turkey pieces (a leg, a breast, a wing, and some turkey livers) and "assembled" a half of turkey. It worked pretty well considering it is just Queen Bee and I.
This year we went with a large chicken, 7 pound capon, which isn't really much smaller then the turkey we would normally get for the family (usually around 11 pounds)
So along with the chicken we had the normal sides... peas, stuffing, mashed potatoes.
The trick part was the cranberry sauce. Cranberry sauce does not exist here and it is pretty fundamental for Thanksgiving. We had not thought ahead to bring some over last time we were in the US. But I had brought some dried cranberries that Queen Bee used to use in her normal lunch salad. F=Somewhere along the way these dropped off her menu so we still had a couple bags of them.
She check the web to see if there any recipes for sauce or some suitable side dish using dried cranberries. But no luck. She did not that allspice seemed to be a common ingredient for some cranberry dishes. So we decided to wing it and create some thing. My guess for something that might approach the correct texture and taste good was...
- One bag dried cranberries
- Port (which we happened to have sitting around)
- Brown sugar
- Allspice
... Perfect! It was probably the best cranberry sauce we ever had. It will now become our holiday standard for the future. Live and learn as they say.
So so managed to have a very successful day with lots of good food (by the way, the capon was really good as well).
Sorry, no photo's.
