Post by Lara
24 November 2012
This year was the first year that both of us spent
Thanksgiving without making a trip to see any of our family, and we have to
admit, we were a little sad about it. We
both feel very close to our families, and we look forward to holiday gatherings
to be able to play with the newest babies and catch up with aunts and uncles
and cousins, as well as spending quality time with our immediate families. Happily, we were able to talk to Lara’s
family on the phone on Thanksgiving and Skype with Kevin’s family the day
after, so we can’t complain too much.
In true Lara and Kevin form, we still wanted to celebrate
Thanksgiving in a somewhat traditional way, with gobs of food. Lucky for us,
pumpkin and sweet potatoes are easy to come by, as well as chicken (no turkey
in Salone—though rumor has it the Guinea hen is somewhat similar). Potatoes come and go, but the week of
Thanksgiving they were not around, so we relied on a package of instant mashed
potatoes that Lara’s family sent us. We also had stockpiled 3 packages of
Stovetop stuffing, of which we decided to use 2. The week before we planned to celebrate, a
friend from the market gave us a chicken. The kind with feathers that walks
around and pecks at the ground. A
male. We weren’t really planning to get
into keeping chickens to kill and eat ourselves, but when Thanksgiving dinner
falls into your lap you take it, so we kept the unlucky guy alive until the day
of. We were wise enough not to give him
a “real” name—we just called him dinner.
Below is a photo of our hen, Dot (the orange one), and dinner.
Because school had closed for the upcoming presidential
election, our friend Mike who teaches about 30 miles away came to visit for a
week, and we planned our Thanksgiving dinner for the eve of the election,
figuring we wouldn’t want to be out in town that day anyway. Mike hails from Akron, Ohio—not so far from
our own home. We began cooking around 3,
and didn’t put out the coal fire until after 10pm. Because we saved up a number
of things that had been sent from the states and Mike was able to bring some
luxury commodities from Bo, we were able to put together a pretty delicious
menu. Here is a list followed by a photo:
- Lemongrass chicken
- Garlic mashed potatoes with gravy
- Stovetop stuffing with raisins and onions
- Sweet potato casserole with marshmallows on top
- Papaya-cranberry sauce (papaya cooked with cranberry juice- tasted a bit like gummy bears)
- Red wine
- Pumpkin pie
We didn’t have a corkscrew, so we employed a technique we
picked up in college for opening our bottle of wine. Don’t worry- no one was harmed in the opening
or consumption of the wine. After about
6 hours of cooking, we sat down to a pretty-darn-close-to-perfect Thanksgiving
dinner, and for a while we forgot we weren’t in Ohio.
- Modern technology that allows us to keep in touch with family and friends thousands of miles away
- A Peace Corps family that supports us in every way, and makes us proud to volunteer in Sierra Leone
- A whole new set of friends and family that we would never have met had we not decided to get on a plane 6 months ago and spend 2 years working in a country we knew almost nothing about
- Each other—without whom this adventure would not be so easy. We both have the benefit of being able to share our Peace Corps experience with our best friend, which makes it all the more worthwhile.
Questions:
ReplyDelete1 - dinner or Dinner?
2 - shoe to open the wine? I've always wanted to try that
1- dinner. If we capitalize it, then it's a "real" name, and then we would have had PTSD from having to kill our chicken we just named. That's the fear, anyway
Delete2- Yes! the shoe method works pretty well, but for whatever reason whenever we do it the cork goes in, not out, so we pushed the cork into the bottle and then later I used a cool party trick with a bandana to get the cork back out.