There is something to be said for being single. You generally get invited to others' homes for the holidays, since no expects a single person to cook. I used to love cooking for the holidays when I had ready access to all of the ingredients that I required, but living abroad gives all new meaning to meal preparations.
This Thursday is the American holiday, Thanksgiving. For a few years, we were lucky. Ron had a fellow docent at the museum who had access to the American Embassy commissary. It is restricted to American employees and their immediate families. She would get us an All-American Butterball turkey. That eliminated the major obstacle, but then there were others that were needed to make a 'traditional' meal. Each year became a bit easier. We are now about to find sweet potatoes and yams at Tesco, for example.
Just to be on the safe side, I had canned pumpkin and stuffing mix on my wish list. We had four cans of cranberries, but their expiration date was long past. After sending a query to Ask-a-Nutritionist, they responded that they should be tossed; out they went. We do have a guest coming on Thanksgiving morning, so I put in a request and invited him for dinner with us.
This year, there will be 8 people at our dinner table. Three of them will be strangers. One is our B and B guest, while 2 are friends of the friends we had last year for dinner. These friends just happen to be arriving on the holiday. They were included in the mix.
So what about the turkey? Last year, Ron found a poultry butcher that would get us a whole turkey, but it was small. We want a big sucker that weighs in about 14 lbs. For some reason, they think we are foreign crazies to first of all want a whole turkey and then secondly to want one so big. Most people don't have an oven the size needed to cook a turkey whole. That took a long time to realize. For the longest time, I was suspecting that they hatched turkey parts, not turkey chicks. "Oh Zsolt, look at this egg. We are going to have a healthy turkey leg from this one. That egg over there had a nice breast in it. This batch of eggs are producing some sizable parts."
We were going to break down and order our dinner from one of the hotels. In years past, three of them the Marriott, Intercontinental, and the Kempinski all had dinners cooked and delivered on the day at the time you specified. This year, only one has the offer and they are taking advantage of the fact. A turkey dinner for 4 regular diners to 6 anorexics is costing 29,500 Huf. Even with the good exchange rates that is still around $137.00. Sorry, but that is way too much.
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