Thanksgiving

Like many of you, we celebrated Thanksgiving this weekend with a group of French and American friends. Organized as a pot-luck, I made caramelized sweet potatoes and a pecan pie. I ended up making two pies because I didn't realize I didn't have enough pecans for the first one and I didn't prick the bottom of the pie crust before I poured in the filling. This resulted in a bubbled pie crust with most of the pecans on one side of the pie. It was ugly, and there was no way I was serving it (although B and I have certified that it tastes good), so we went out and bought more pecans and I made a second, very pretty pie.
We had turkey, stuffing, Brussels sprouts, mashed and quartered potatoes, salad, caramelized sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce. I cut the bread in the foreground of the picture, but maybe due to the American influence of the menu the French guests didn't take any (what?! no bread?). That or they didn't have any space left on their plastic plates (there wasn't room to eat at a table so we were on chairs, the couch, and even a few on the floor).For dessert, there was a pumpkin pie (kind of hidden at the top of the picture), a sweet potato and fluff pie (being cut), pecan, apple, and carrot cake (bottom one). The French loved my pecan pie and were completely stumped by the flavors. It actually turned out to be a little bit runny in the middle (could have used 5 more minutes in the oven), but the French didn't know that.

Along with eating lots of yummy food and getting to draw hand turkeys on the paper table cloth, we also met lots of new people and will hopefully be seeing them again soon. In a way it's kind of sad, but I've made more friends since the beginning of November when I joined France États-Unis than in the almost two years we've been in Toulouse.

After drinking lots of wine and ice tea, eating lots of food, and chatting with the other guests, B and I finally went home about 1am.

I almost forgot to mention the sweet potato incident! I didn't cook the potatoes before going, just put them and the sauce in a casserole dish and covered it with foil so I could cook it at the party (we also brought our oven to facilitate the cooking). When we arrived though we discovered that the melted butter and sugar had sloshed over the side of the dish a bit during the ride and covered part of a seat belt in the back of the car. B grabbed a reusable grocery bag from the trunk and put the dripping dish in that, but in the darkness he must have poured a little bit of juice into the bag, because when I took the wrapped casserole I realized something was dripping on my knee and foot after 5 steps. Once inside the apartment I saw that the juice had dripped over my coat, my skirt, and my shoe. Nothing's ruined, but it was just kind of a pain. The sweet potatoes almost didn't make it to the table as well. Our oven got set up on the balcony near the only available outlet, which meant it was easy to forget about the food you were cooking when you were inside listening to music. Once the potatoes were cooked, I took off the foil and put on the marshmallows and moved the rack up to put them right under the broiler. Twenty minutes later I came back to smoke and a slightly burnt dish. I saved it though by picking out all the carbonized marshmallows and cutting off any burned potato parts. What's Thanksgiving though without a cooking emergency?