So many folks have asked about how we celebrated Thanksgiving that I decided I had better add a blog entry about our day.
I’m sorry we don’t have more and better pictures, but we were so busy preparing and then eating that we forgot about our cameras.
We decided on a pot luck menu and each student signed up for a dish that they wanted to contribute.
I agreed to do the turkey, gravy, and pies. The students signed up for stuffing, squash, corn, bread, wine, pumpkin bread, fresh hot applesauce, and don’t forget the green bean casserole. There may have been more things that I'm missing. We had a lot of food and it was all yummy.
The student wing of the dorm has three kitchens. The only things that work in the first kitchen are the sink and the fridge!
This is the 2nd kitchen in the boys’ apartment in cleaner days at the beginning of the semester. It is the best equipped with a working electric stove, sink and fridge (in the background) along with fairly adequate counter space.
Here's an earlier photo of the 3rd kitchen eating area. You can just see the counter with the burners and sink in the background. There are two sets of burners built into the counter top and a sink and two large refrigerators, but no oven. This arrangement caused challenges.
In the 2nd kitchen we had the turkey breasts—four of them—in the oven with two per pan on two "racks". A visiting family brought sage to make the turkey taste just right.
I should mention that this oven, just like the one in our apartment and the ones on the higher floors of the dorm, has just one rack and then if you are careful you can make the broiler pan stay in the holders along the sides of the oven to make a second rack. They can hold nothing much larger than a 9 X 13 pan.
The 2nd kitchen was also the scene of a great deal of pealing! The students pealed an unknown quantity of kilograms of apples and potatoes. Then they had large pots of applesauce and potatoes cooking on the top of the stove.
Meanwhile the ingredients for the stuffing were being carefully chopped on the table of the 3rd kitchen in the girls’ apartment.
It smelled wonderful—onions, mushrooms, celery, etc. Salt, pepper, and poultry seasoning were added to this and the dry bread crumbs along with bouillon. All that went into 3 flat pans. Now we had to search for more ovens!
We found out that there were two gas ovens each on the 2nd and 3rd floor of the dorm that we could use. They didn’t all work, though! But we did manage to light 3 of them.
We put one pan of stuffing into one of the ovens of the 3rd floor and the other two pans into the 2nd oven in the 3rd floor kitchen. These ovens had no numbers on the thermostats, but straight up seemed like a good choice.
A pan of seasoned potato wedges went into the one oven that worked on the 2nd floor for the roasted potatoes.
The traditional green bean casserole had been made earlier that afternoon and the squash had also been roasted earlier. There were two kinds of squash—plain and another wondeful pan with honey and brown sugar. They were warmed again. I know the corn was cooked, but I have no recollection of where!
While all this was going on, the tables were arranged and set in our 3rd floor classroom. We had to use disposable plates and glasses because there were not enough of the washable type. But we did manage to pool our resources for enough regular forks. You just can’t use plastic forks on Thanksgiving. There were 11 Calvin students, plus one friend from Dordt, our Hungarian teacher, three Hungarian students and Corwin and me. That's a total of 18.
The rest of the Calvin students were traveling that weekend and other Hungarians that we had invited were not able to attend.
Then the gravy was made, pictures taken and we were ready to eat! It was just past 5pm.
Food and wine was passed and passed. When we began the large blue pot was about 2/3 full of mashed potatoes and the smaller white one was quite full of hot applesauce.
Seconds were available.
The mashed potatoes tasted like home.
We had a lot of good conversation to go with the good food.
Our Hungarian teacher remarked that this was a true 'pot luck' with the pots right on the table. We have almost no serving dishes.
The plate of pumpkin bread was gone quickly.
I don’t have any pictures of the pies, but we had several.
Another visiting family brought us canned pumpkin for pies. It was then that I realized I had never seen evaporated or canned milk of any sort in Hungary. Thank goodness for the Internet! I found a recipe that used melted vanilla ice cream instead of evaporated milk. Everyone thought they tasted just fine.
We had to have a sour cream raisin pie for Corwin (his favorite). It looked funny with no meringue but since we had no mixer, meringue was out of the question. Fortunately, they do sell aerosol cans of whipped cream, so we used that instead.
Hungarians don’t really make pie. There was one Pyrex casserole lid in our apartment that I could use as a pie pan, but I had to buy new ones for the pumpkin pies. I found one store that sold them.
For the last ‘pie’ I made my Mom’s apple squares in a lasagna pan. This pan was huge and I think the recipe was tripled! But they were gone before Friday I was told.
The middle two students in this picture are Vera and Melinda. They will be coming to Calvin for the January 2009 interim.
Our last pictures are of us toasting with small glasses of palinka, a spirit native to Hungary, distilled from fruit grown on the great Hungarian plain. It's very potent stuff. We’re toasting here with our Hungarian friends, Vera, Melinda and Istvan (Steven).
Here you can see how very little was left from that huge pot of mashed potatoes.
It was a great Thanksgiving.
