Our Blog - Thanksgiving 2020

Happy Thanksgiving! This year has been a bit different than previous years, and Thanksgiving was no exception. We are still under a lockdown here in France, and so it was just the 3 of us! Normally, we have multiple Thanksgiving's per year .... one on Thanksgiving day (either at our house with friends or at a friends house with even more friends) and one on the Sunday after at a hotel/restaurant nearby that is owned by an American lady, and sometimes another one on Saturday with yet another set of American friends. We did our traditional Thanksgiving meal here and while we had the option of ordering a to-go Thanksgiving meal from the hotel/restaurant, we decided not to.

We pulled out the china, which was a gift from my brother when he lived in Germany, since we still wanted to make this a special occasion. We also used our placemats that were gifts from some colleagues of mine from Bucharest, Romania.

We were pretty traditional with our food choices! We did turkey parts again (a skinless/boneless turkey breast and a leg/thigh) using the recipe from our friend Annie. It actually works out great since it is easier to find than whole turkeys and since sometimes they cook for different times, you can pull out each piece as it gets done so that nothing gets overcooked. I also did mashed potatoes with homemade gravy (no turkey-gravy-in-the-jar here) and homemade cranberry sauce (left of the mashed potatoes but really hard to see because I used a black bowl). Then candied yams that we did in the crock pot with marshmallows and maraschino cherries, and a smoked oyster stuffing that is an old family recipe. The smoked oysters are difficult to find here since they general just eat their oysters raw, but we did find some in Quiberon (Brittany) this summer that were imported from South Korea. The maraschino cherries are also a little different here, at least the ones we found this year, as they were not bright red but a darker red color and smaller. But when I opened the can, they smelled exactly like I remembered! I also made a pie using Butternut for dessert (not shown).

We also decided to give Lucy a little bit of a Thanksgiving treat. I had wanted to separate out a little bit of the turkey breast that I would cook separately (no oil or salt/pepper) but I totally forgot to cut it off before I brined the turkey parts, so I cooked her a hot dog instead. I also gave her some raw yams and red peppers (both healthy for dogs). I had set aside some butternut purée that I had made a few days before to use in a pie, that we added to her dinner later that night.

Hopefully, the numbers will look good when December 15th comes around, and we can then move to Stage 2 of the easing of the lockdown restrictions. We hope to be able to have some friends over for a nice Christmas dinner. This year, I am planning on doing a more traditional French Christmas meal, so foie gras, maybe a goose, some raw oysters. I will still do our family Christmas eve, which will be shrimp cocktail and homemade pirogies using a recipe that Tom's mom had given me.