Thanksgiving Week

Have you ever tried to celebrate a festival, dear to your heart, in an environment where no one else is celebrating it?  I thought I was used to it, having lived in countries that didn’t celebrate Christmas. Thanksgiving is always more difficult.  I celebrate it because North American Thanksgivings are the only national holidays I know of that go beyond the borders of religions and non-religions.  A whole country is giving thanks together.  Celebrating it here in England this year was “eventful”, to put it mildly.

A week of torrential rain, pounding on windows, catching reflected light jewels as it trickled down the glass, in my warmly lit dining room.

Wind lashing through the trees, stripping them into whips.

Roads turned into gushing rivers of red mud.

Paths gouged out of their huge rocks, making treacherous a normal walkers’ path.

The darkness creeping in, swallowing more Autumn light each day.

Three weeks (so far) of “Black Friday Sales” in a country that neither celebrates Thanksgiving nor knows when it takes place.

The curious scent-combination of freshly baking bread coupled with Brasso, as I give the Persian brasses their Thanksgiving polish.  (Alternatively, I could have used lemon and salt, lemon and baking soda, white vinegar and flour, or – yes really –ketchup. But I already had Brasso.)

The attendant who left a people-packed garage/grocery store, in order to rummage through a back freezer for cranberries, “so that you could enjoy your Thanksgiving meal”.  Cranberries come out for sale only at Christmas here.

Daringly bought Crispy Fried Onions” – a new product to us here.  Could I really brave it, making the traditional American Thanksgiving casserole:  green beans, cheese, condensed mushroom soup, and topped with fried onions?  Naaaah.  Probably not. 

Certainly not the jello salad, either.  Or marshmallows on sweet potatoes.  The dishes would elicit weird looks and gentle, polite avoidance.

It happens at last!

After shopping, finding, cooking, following a tightly controlled Gandt chart, the meal is ready and Thanksgiving with the family is happening! Four days late.  But I loved every minute of it.  I always do.

Azerbaidzhani Eggplant Omelet

I disliked aubergine (eggplant) most of my life until I worked in the Middle East.  Their cuisine, thousands of years older than mine, transforms this vegetable into mouth-watering deliciousness.  As a change from Thanksgiving, I dug out this recipe from my battered Russian cookbook so that you could have a go. I changed some of the instructions, having lived in the Middle East (ahem, name dropping) and learned from the Middle Easterners themselves.   When I made it, I halved the amount of this recipe.

Servings 2 – 4

Ingredients

1 tender aubergine (eggplant)

Salt

1 onion minced

2 tablespoons cooking oil or butter

1 ripe tomato, peeled and chopped (I used a couple of tablespoons from a can of chopped tomato).

Salt and pepper to taste

4 eggs

2 tablespoons “chopped green parsley” (isn’t parsley always green?)

Preheat oven to 230 degrees C  (450 degrees F). 

Peel aubergine, dice it, sprinkle it with 2 tsps salt.  Let stand for 15 minutes.  When it has given off its bitter juice, rinse it and squeeze it thoroughly in a towel.  Fry it with onion in oil or butter. 

When the onion is tender, add tomato and cook until tomato juice is absorbed.  Season with ground black pepper to taste.  Pour over 4 beaten eggs and put the whole pan in the oven to bake until firm (about 5+ minutes).  Sprinkle with the chopped green parsley, and serve at once. 

Warmed Middle Eastern bread goes well with it. (Photo depicts our local shop’s nearest match to Middle Eastern bread.)

Floral display by Joy Rickwood.  Photos by Joy and me. 

8 comments

    1. Thanks, Lou. The writing is a joy to do. Putting it together with pictures, being attacked by offers and instructions I don’t understand, makes the publication mind-stretching to the point of needing a sherry at 11 a.m.! Judy

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  3. Hi Judy. As we have a big ‘do’ on Saturday we didn’t do Thanksgiving this year for the first time in many years. We always have marshmallows on sweet potatoes, yes the green bean casserole and always pumpkin pie. People have always enjoyed it. In the early years when things like sweet potatoes were unknown in England generally, I added Harvard beets and they have become one of the holiday regulars. One year our friend was coming over from the American School in the Hague and he stopped in Brixton on the way and bought some sweet potatoes in the market there.

    Love Sue

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  5. A wonderful account of Thanksgiving in England. I have a similar feeling here in the Netherlands, that of not being able to celebrate in the traditional way, but instead of cooking, I tend to get in touch with people on my contact list who I rarely hear from during the course of the year. I find it a nice way to mark the day, especially when it is cold, wet, and dark outside…

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  6. Merry Christmas Judy, Joy and family. As always, I enjoyed reading your blog and hearing first hand about the flooding and Thanksgiving preparations in England. Your descriptions are much more colorful than what we hear and see on the news. Was happy to see the eggplant recipe. We attend a Sabbath keeping church where a lot of the members are vegetarian. I’m always looking for ideas to feed them since I was raised on a three meat a day diet. (Probably the reason my father died at 52.) Praying that 2025 is a healthy, blessed year for you and all your loved ones.

    Love, Carolyn

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