Turkey Day

We have had a lot of “firsts” while living here, but I don’t think many of them will be as memorable as our first Thanksgiving here.

I know that from talking to other married women and to my friends, that the first time a girl hosts Thanksgiving and the first time that she cooks a turkey, she is usually pretty nervous. She wants it to be the perfect turkey, meal, and setting that her Mom or Grandmother was able to pull off year after year. I thought when I got married, that it’d be a few years before I had to host a large holiday event. The house we lived in while we were in Charleston just can’t handle the size of our family gatherings, so I knew I was off the hook until we lived in a larger place. Then all of a sudden it seemed like, we were living in Africa in the only mzungu home that could host a large gathering. I am happy that this is the case, because we love to host get-togethers, but this also meant that if a Thanksgiving dinner was going to happen in Masindi, it was going to happen at our house.

We found out a few weeks ago that all of the other Americans living here (all 3 of them) were not going to be around on Thanksgiving Day, so we thought we were off the hook in a way. We thought we would just go to dinner somewhere here or in Kampala and celebrate with just the two of us. We both love Thanksgiving, so we knew we would be missing family and home, so we thought that if we went and ate sushi or something, we wouldn’t realize we were even missing a favorite holiday. So, that was our plan until about a week ago…

Our neighbor, and one of the few Americans around, is a missionary working with the Anglican Church here. She has been here almost 5 years now, and other than her skin color, she has fully adapted to living like a Ugandan. She has a large garden and many farm animals including chickens, ducks, 2 cows, goats, sheep, pigs, dogs, and oddly enough…turkeys. Turkeys are not common around here, but she has domesticated a few of them and has been trying to breed them. For those of you who have met Janine, or even better, been to her house, you can really appreciate this more. For those of you who haven’t met her, she is one of a kind. She has been extremely helpful in helping us get settled here in offering advice, suggestions, cultural tips, and best of all, her cooking! She is a great cook and can make things that you can’t find around here but that you miss from home like pastries, certain vegetables, and other treats. So that’s some background on Janine.

So to continue the Thanksgiving story, Janine comes to our house the other day and tells us that she knows we weren’t planning on having Thanksgiving dinner anymore because no one was here to celebrate. She thought that we were sad about it I guess, so she wanted to offer us a Thanksgiving “gift” as she called it. She said that she wanted us to pick out one of her male turkeys to have for Thanksgiving dinner. Oh boy, I thought. I’ve never even cooked a whole turkey before much less slaughtered one and prepared it. I have shot doves and have no problem helping my dad clean and cook those because they are so small, but a turkey is a whole other bird. Newman claims to have killed some chickens on a friends’ land as a child, but he has yet to kill and clean a turkey either (despite his strong desire to call in a turkey and kill it one day). So, we accepted her offer as a gift like that around here is a very generous one. As you know, a turkey provides a lot of meat which is a treat around here.

So we thought ok, I guess if we are going to cook a turkey, then we need to have some of the traditional sides to go along with it. We were either going to be all in or all out when it came to this. I started making a list in my head of what I could make here, without a trip to Kampala to buy ingredients. We also thought about how the two of us were going to eat all of this food ourselves. Also, the week of Thanksgiving was turning out to be a really busy one, and we couldn’t see how we were going to be able to take Thursday off to prepare everything. We decided that we should wait until the weekend so that we could properly enjoy ourselves, and it turned out that everyone who was going to be out of town would return in time to celebrate on Saturday. Also, it turned out that there would be a few extra Americans around that day for different reasons, so we had a decent group now to justify the work of cooking everything.

So I made a menu of what I was going to make and others chipped in as well. We were going to have the turkey, corn pudding, green bean casserole with homemade fried onions, potato salad, and stuffing. Emily, our Peace Corps volunteer, was going to bring dessert, and Janine would bring something from her garden. So with that decided, we made plans to deal with the turkey. Newman had a small window of free time late Friday afternoon between meetings and we decided that we needed to use that time to kill and clean the turkey.

We walked down to Janine’s house to pick one out. I thought these turkeys were going to be around 12 pounds or so and easy to manage but we were shocked to see two HUGE male turkeys to choose from. We looked them over and tried to pick the one that looked maybe a pound or two smaller, but really they were about the same (around 20lbs).  Newman and Wilson picked one up and Newman walked him home. We picked a place in the back of the yard by the compost pit and Newman quickly and as humanely as possible killed the turkey. We are all hunters, so this doesn’t bother us, but a turkey was a first for all of us, including Wilson. It took about 45 minutes to pluck it and thankfully, Newman took the job of cleaning it out. (yuck!) I told him he was my hero because it looked very unpleasant from my view across the kitchen. So once he did all of the nasty bits, I told him to leave for his meeting and I’d finish it up. It really wasn’t bad at that point. Janine told us that we should brine it over night before we cooked it, so we decided to do that only I didn’t have a pot big enough. The turkey ended up diving head first into a trashcan filled with saltwater over night in the fridge. Don’t judge us, it worked.

So, they next day we got up early and I cooked all of the sides before noon when the turkey was to go in the oven. We covered it in spices and stuffed it with citrus fruit and it really was not as scary of a process as I thought it was going to be. We were however afraid that it wouldn’t fit in our oven, but we managed to shove it in there.

By about 5pm we had a crowd of 6 Americans and 2 Ugandans and we ate our very first turkey. It was delicious and fully cooked which was my main concern.

It was an adventurous undertaking, but it all turned out really well and we had a great time. Everyone really seemed to appreciate the effort and we all felt like for a little while that we were back home. I missed my pumpkin pie, cranberries, and sweet potatoes, but I think I can convince someone to make those over Christmas while we are home J

I told Newman that I can’t believe our first time hosting Thanksgiving and cooking a turkey was in Africa and we had to do everything from scratch. He laughed and said, “yeah but just think, it’s all downhill from here!” This is true. The next holidays will seem like a piece of cake from now on.

So here are some pictures documenting the experience. I took some videos too, but they take all day to upload so I will just post the pictures. Enjoy and thanks for keeping up with us! We are so thankful for SO many things in our lives and being able to share these experiences and document them for ourselves is one of them. Even though it’s a little early, Merry Christmas to you all and hope to see you in the U.S. in a few weeks!

Love,

Trish

 

Walking up to Janine's house

Browsing in the turkey isle

Newman teaching Wilson about turkey spurs and beards

Goofballs

Taking Tom home

Happy customer

Bye Bye Tom

*WARNING: BLOOD*

 

Janine came to help pluck

 

Newman elbow deep in turkey

 

 

 

Turkey in a trash can and box wine = resourceful, cheap, and classy

 

Newman giving Tom a massage

 

Before...

 

After

 

Carving time

 

Mustafa took over

 

The Spread

 

Emily our Peace Corps Volunteer and a fello PCV from Hoima, Kristina