Thanksgiving

Chilean food is bad. The drinks are exceptional, but the food is universally lackluster. Therefore my roommates and I decided almost immediately after moving in together that we had to redeem our gastronomically-deprived existences here by pulling out all the stops and cooking a real, honest-to-goodness, no-holds-barred Thanksgiving dinner. We also really wanted to share the tradition of Thanksgiving with all our new foreign friends, so we decided to host a Thanksgiving party at our house. There was only one problem—finding a turkey.

I think we United Statesians sometimes figure that big, fat turkeys just fall out of the sky come late November. We forget how rare of a food staple whole turkeys are (imagine looking for a whole turkey in your supermarket in August). Chileans do, in fact, eat whole turkeys around Christmastime, but because Thanksgiving is a month before Christmas, we couldn’t find whole turkeys anywhere and we were told by many people that we would never be able to find one in the supermarkets. They told us that we really had only one option—look for a live turkey out in the countryside and get someone to kill it for us.

Because I had offered to be in charge of cooking the turkey, I took it upon my self to be the lead on the turkey hunt. I knew that Dennis’ mom had experience with killing turkeys, so I coordinated the details of the hunt with Dennis (a Peruvian volunteer). I realized seconds into talking with him that finding the turkey was going to be way more complicated than I had imagined. I guess I just thought we would get in a truck, go find a turkey, kill it and then cook it the next day—pretty cut and dry. But it so happened that Dennis couldn’t go the night before Thanksgiving to get the turkey, so we ended up having to go on a weekend.

Going on the weekend meant we would have to either kill the turkey that weekend and freeze it until Turkey Day or we would need to keep the turkey alive until the night before Thanksgiving and kill it then. The easiest option would have been to just freeze the turkey and not have to worry about keeping it alive, but I have been trained that eating frozen turkeys on Thanksgiving just isn’t an option. So I stuck to my guns and said freezing the turkey was out.

In light of this we had no other choice but to go to the Santiago countryside to look for a turkey. Dennis warned me that we would need to go door to door at family farms asking for a turkey and that there was no guarantee we would be able to find one. I was a little worried about that, but soon I became more worried about where exactly we would keep the hypothetical live turkey before it went under the knife. Dennis didn’t want to ask his mom if they could keep it at his house because they had a dog and they didn’t want the dog eating the turkey. And I knew we couldn’t keep it at our house because my roommate, Emily, is a vegetarian and I figured she wouldn’t want to see the turkey walking around our patio one day and in the oven the next. So I asked Elliot, my coworker at Domingo Savio, if they could keep the turkey at the volunteer house (a house where eight or so of the volunteers live). Elliot was actually excited by the idea of having a “pet” for a few days, so he said there was no problem with the turkey staying there, he just had to clear the idea with his roommates.

I thought the turkey’s habitation was taken care of, but the next day Elliot came to work and told me that some of the girls in the volunteer house were not so keen on the idea of the turkey staying with them. They thought they would get too attached to it and would be traumatized by its death. I didn’t want to upset anyone but I also really didn’t want to have Thanksgiving without a turkey. I mentioned my dilemma to Dennis one day and he told me he would ask his mom if they could keep the turkey at his house. To my relief, Dennis’ mom pulled through for us. Now all we needed was lady luck on our side when we went and solicited people for turkey.

The turkey hunt commenced on a nice, balmy day the Sunday before Thanksgiving. The hunters were me, Parmella, Dennis and Brooke—the same group that went to Mendoza. We drove to the outskirts of Santiago and then Dennis began the painstaking task of asking where we could find turkeys. The first tip we got was a good one, leading us to a farm that did, indeed, have several turkeys. The problem was that it was breeding season and they didn’t want to sell them. But we couldn’t really stay mad at them for not selling us a turkey because they let us tour their mini-zoo for free, which included a vicuña, (a llama-like animal with the softest fur you can imagine and a penchant for nuzzling humans) a very pregnant donkey, sheep and all different kinds of birds.

A vicuña nuzzling Parmella

After our trip to the zoo I figured we would find a turkey pretty easily at the next farm due to the ease with which we found an assortment of turkeys at the first farm. Unfortunately we had to go to about 15 different farms before finding one, with everyone giving us different directions on where we should look for the elusive bird. Dennis did all the work on the hunt—driving ever so slowly along the rocky, dusty roads as we were jostled around and getting down at each stop to see if they had turkeys in stock (while us girls stayed in the car). Right as we were starting to lose faith in our search, we finally found our turkey on one of the farms. Once we had made our purchase they tied our turkey’s legs together and weighed him upside down, (he weighed about 9 kilos) causing him to throw up on Dennis’ shoes, much to our amusement. I disapproved of the turkey’s transportation conditions—we had to put him in Dennis’ trunk—but we really didn’t have much of a choice because he wasn’t going to be sitting on one of our laps. The turkey hadn’t moved an inch by the time we got to Dennis’ mom’s house and it seemed completely unfazed by the car ride and by its change of scenery.

Dennis, Parmella and Brooke with our turkey

Brooke, Parmella and Elliot all attended the turkey execution, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to see it die since I was the one who had to have my hands all up in the turkey the next day. Although I didn’t attend the beheading, I got very gruesome details about its eventful death. I won’t share all of them here, but let’s just say that chickens aren’t the only animals that run (or fly) around with their heads cut off…

With the turkey in our possession, we moved on to planning the rest of the party. We divided the lion’s share of the dinner amongst the three of us and asked the rest of the people who were coming to bring their favorite side dish/dessert (with the boys bringing things like wine and plastic silverware). I was in charge of the turkey and the mashed potatoes, Brooke was in charge of berry-apple crumble, chocolate chip pumpkin squares, cornbread stuffing and tangerine-glazed carrots (Brooke reaaaaly likes to cook!) and Emily was in charge of making green beans and butternut squash puree. We were all very excited about cooking our families’ respective favorite dishes and although we had trouble locating some of the ingredients we needed (such as pumpkin) we got all the grocery shopping done and somehow packed all the food we needed into our always-cramped fridge and pantry.

We were having a really great time planning the party until we came across an unforeseen sticking-point—the food setup. We knew we were going to have to eat Japanese-style on the floor in our living room because we didn’t have enough tables and chairs to fit the 30 people who had RSVP’d to our event. That was a given. But we couldn’t agree on where we wanted to serve all the food. I figured we would just put all the food on our big dining room table and have people serve themselves buffet-style, just like we’ve always done it in my family. Brooke was very adamant that we put all the food on the living room floor/table in a bunch of separate bowls so that people would not have to get up and go to the next room to get seconds. I thought Brooke’s proposed setup of splitting everything up into a million bowls sounded like it would complicate our lives unnecessarily. We basically had a knock-down, drag-out fight about this (although Brooke insisted it wasn’t a fight) and although Emily was on my side, Brooke ended up winning. We made up like good roommates, though, and I pretty much ate my words when I saw Brooke’s vision come to life.

When the big day finally arrived, I woke up early to welcome the infamous Matías Pablo Pavo (that was the name Parmella and Brooke elected for the turkey—pavo is Spanish for turkey) to our home. To my horror and surprise, Matías still had his neck on and he also had a strange yellowish outer skin that looked very unappetizing. I had to peel off as much of the yellowish skin as I could and I also had to hack, saw, pull and twist the neck until I finally got it off. Before I had even begun to season the oddly-shaped, skinny turkey I was already sick of him. On top of that, I had no idea how much he actually weighed without his feathers, I didn’t know what temperature I was putting him in the oven at because we don’t have a temperature dial on our oven, and I didn’t have a meat thermometer to check his doneness. Because I really had no idea how long this stupid bird was going to take or how I was going to tell if he was cooked, my anxiety level was high as I stuck our turkey in the oven and said a little prayer that it wouldn’t come out either grossly dry or undercooked.

Me hating cooking the turkey...look how weird it looks!

Already fed up with the turkey, I set to peeling the 20 pounds of potatoes that we bought to be mashed. Brooke, Emily and I took the day off of work to prepare for the party and even though I didn’t stop cooking from the second I woke up in the morning, I had a really great time singing, stirring, tasting and laughing with my roommates all day long.

Sooner than we knew it, people started pouring into our house for the party. I was very preoccupied with getting all the food hot at the same time, and when all the food finally was hot, we set it out in the living room per Brooke’s specifications. But in all my preoccupation with heating food, I forgot that A) we were cooking for a bunch of 20-somethings who wanted to hang out and have a few drinks before sitting down to dinner, and B) the turkey needed to be carved. So by the time we corralled all the drinkers and got some turkey on their plates, the side dishes were lukewarm at best. But the smiling faces and merry laughter around me made me realize that the food, while absolutely delicious, was not what people would remember most about the night. What people would remember was the familial sense of togetherness we all shared around our 50-foot-long “table” made out of holiday-colored tablecloths. Brooke’s communal setup was so warm and picturesque, it was like something out of a movie. All in all, our Thanksgiving party was a big hit.

The infamous table setup

"Team Man" getting ready to cut the turkey

Everyone enjoying the spread

In the process of getting ready for my Thanksgiving extravaganza, I was asked by many people why Americans celebrate Thanksgiving—what’s all the fuss about? At first I didn’t really know how to answer them. I bumbled through explanations about pilgrims and Native Americans being thankful for their harvest. But it seemed like my answer was lacking. Thanksgiving means more than that, but I had never really paused to think about why. Well this Thanksgiving, thousands of miles away from anyone who knows what Stove Top dressing is, I realized that for me the holiday is about togetherness. What better way to give thanks than to actively be in the presence of the people who bear witness to your life?

I can’t say that I didn’t miss my family this Thanksgiving, but I can say that I was very thankful for the companions I’ve been blessed with in my journey so far.