Italian Thanksgiving

Yum.

I'm very lucky. Out of all the families here in Italy, I am living with probably THE only one that actually celebrates our American holiday of Thanksgiving! Zoila lived in the U.S. for ten years and greatly appreciates our holidays and traditions, so she really wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving as well. We tried to invite several families to join us for our feast, but since no one around here really even understands what Thanksgiving is, no one took up the offer. We still had a delicious and fabulous meal though! 

Now that's a delicious meal!!

Since Thursday was still a work and school day for everyone here in Italy, we decided to celebrate on Saturday instead. I woke up early on Saturday morning to help Zoila start cooking, and we spent the entire morning preparing. Here's a couple things to know about trying to cook Thanksgiving food in Italy: 1. Don't expect to be able to find your traditional Thanksgiving ingredients in a small town in Umbria, and 2. Your Thanksgiving meal is (still!) going to have Parmesan and olive oil in it somewhere! We had turkey, of course, but Italian-style, and just part of a turkey since there were only a few of us eating. We also made mashed potatoes with Parmesan and some other deliciousness mixed in (very different from American mashed potatoes, but very good), in addition to corn and mashed peas. And you can't have a Thanksgiving meal without stuffing and cranberry sauce! Unfortunately, cranberry sauce is nonexistent in this part of Italy, so we had to find a substitute. But I was very impressed with what Zoila found. It was some sort of mixed berry jam that actually had cranberries in it and when I tasted it, I would have never known it was anything other than regular cranberry sauce!

Apple Nut Stuffing. SO good! I actually helped make most of this!

Mashed peas

I think I'll take a minute here to explain something to you... This entire meal was made from scratch. Not a single ingredient was taken out of a can (ok, well... besides the corn) or from something prepackaged or ready to cook. Everything - the turkey, the peas, the stuffing, the potatoes - was all completely homemade with no help from Betty Crocker or Sara Lee. And the most impressive part of all? The pumpkin pie. There's absolutely no such thing as canned pumpkin here, so that means we made our pie with real, fresh pumpkins. Anyone ever tried a homemade pumpkin pie like that? It's definitely worth it! Zoila made her own pie crust, poured in the mashed pumpkin mixture we concocted, and a few hours later we were digging into an absolutely fabulous, truly homemade pumpkin pie.

We cooked, cleaned, stuffed ourselves, rested, cleaned some more, ate some pie, and had a wonderful day. When I decided to come to Italy over the holidays, I knew I was going to be sacrificing Thanksgiving, since it's only an American holiday. But what an incredible blessing to have still been able to celebrate such a wonderful American tradition, so unexpectedly, halfway across the world in the country of Italy! Now that's something to be truly thankful for :)

Not even a chance of getting everyone to look at the camera...

Everyone was busy all morning... ;-)

Aurelio

Maria Vittoria

me

Thea - part of the fam!

Cesare

Zoila working hard in the kitchen