Thanksgiving, pt. 1

On Friday night, we're having friends over for a Thanksgiving dinner. This appeals both to my love of cooking and my love of obsessive planning and list-making.

It's also a pretty fun challenge to make American recipes in Sweden, although in the case of Thanksgiving food, fairly impossible if you haven't planned way ahead and either had your mom send you bottles of vanilla and maple extract or carted back a few cans of pumpkin and packages of wild rice on a return flight.

In the couple years since I last did this, the availability of certain items in Sweden has improved -- wild rice seems readily available at ICA (though it doesn't quite look the same as native Minnesota wild rice) and pumpkins are usually easy to find in October (though my previous attempts to cook and mash pumpkin for pie purposes have ended in watery disaster). Other things are a bit tougher to find, given that Gray's American Foods in Stockholm seems to be in a strange state of flux, maple syrup seems to be less common than before, and the stores that used to have American foods shelves seem to have replaced them with middle-eastern foods (only fair of course). But this is why a good little yankee girl has backups.

The first steps in the mission were of course making a menu and, as I mentioned before, finding a turkey. The turkey, by the way, is on the list of things that now seem more easily available. All three stores where I buy groceries -- ICA Maxi in Tornby, Coop Konsum in Lambohov, and Hemköp in Ryd all had a good supply. They ranged between 3.5 and 5 kg, though I had to look at all three stores before finding the 5 kg bird at Coop. This was also the first thing that needed to be bought, since it needed to thaw out.

So it takes about a week to at least do a half-assed job of this thing. It started on Saturday with me inviting the guests. This is not easy, as we don't have the kind of dining room that allows for huge dinner parties where cats, dogs and babies are involved. This did not, however, stop me from inviting dogs and babies (and about 5 more people than we have butt space for). It's too bad Thanksgiving isn't in the summer, so that yard space could be utilized. I envy my friend Pat, who lives in the desert and surely has nice warm weather around this time so that he's not cooped up in a small space with 12 people on Thanksgiving. Then again, I hear his family deep-fries their turkey, and that's just so many levels of sick.

On Monday I had the menu worked out, and a shopping list. Since I only had a 5 kg bird and suddenly 15 invitees, that list included a couple pounds of extra turkey breast, as that seemed like a smarter solution than buying two turkeys. (In case you're wondering, the traditional guideline is 1 lb = 450 g of turkey per person; if that sounds like a lot, remember that we've got bone and carcass involved here.)

At the risk of this coming back to bite me in the ass (for instance, if I for some reason end up failing on one or two of these dishes), the menu I settled on is as follows:

Menu

Appetizer/mingle/keep people busy while I'm cooking:

• Wild rice and dried cranberry salad
  
• White wine (a dry fruity wine that's just called California White that happens to come in a cardboard carton -- classy! Only the best from my homeland!)
  
• Mineral water for the ladies (I say this because we're all pregnant or nursing; go figure!)
  

Main dish/buffet/hope they realize dessert is coming later:

• Herb-rubbed roasted turkey
  
• Sage bread (non-stuffed) stuffing
  
• Garlic cheddar mashed potatoes
  
• Green bean hotdish (that's casserole to you non-Minnesotans)
  
• That candied sweet potato thing with the marshmallows that everyone's grandmother makes but that apparently doesn't have a name
  
• Sweet country corn bread
  
• Herb dinner rolls
  
• Creamy turkey gravy
  
• Cranberry-orange sauce
  
• Applesauce
  
• California Red, a "soft and berry-y" red wine, also in a classy TetraPak
  
• For aforementioned fertile ladies, Boston Iced Tea
  

Dessert/Yes, dammit, I do expect you to eat more

• Pumpkin cream cheese pie
  
• Maple pecan pie
  
• Coffee and Good Earth Original Tea

This menu ended up containing only one comprimise. I would have rather liked to have mulled apple cider with dessert. This is, however, not something that I've found a way to get my hands on in Sweden. "Cider" here means a kind of booze, of course, and not an all-natural tart apple juice as it does back home. Unlike canned pumpkin or vanilla extract, apple cider is not exactly an item easily smuggled back in a suitcase and stored for several months. Given that we have our own juicer, I certainly could have made my own by combining some, oh, I'd guess Granny Smiths and Royal Galas, but I've never done this before and this amount of work seemed like the bit that would send me over the edge. I decided therefore to instead save the apple cider for some sort of future American Christmas Tea, where I envision serving eggnog and cider along with... with... uh. Okay, we seem to be short on traditional Christmas coffee and cakes type things. Any suggestions as to what our equivalent to lussekatter and pepparkakor is would be greatly appreciated. Anyway, as an alternative to coffee, Good Earth Tea fits very well. I am so in love with this tea (which comes from my favorite restaurant back home, but is also sold in stores like Cub and Rainbow and such, plug plug plug!) that I never come back from the states without a couple packages and you know I like my friends a lot if I'm using it on them. It's sort of like... cinnamon citrus sex in a bag. Just add hot water.

Anyway, that's step one, the menu, which along with a long grocery list was done Monday.

Tuesday brought the shopping (I'm willing to divulge that the total was close to 2000 kronor, not including the stuff that's been imported from the U.S.), the moving of the bird from the freezer to the fridge, and the start of the cooking.

Cranberry-Orange Sauce

I'll share the recipes with you in the order in which I'm making them. Tuesday night I made the cranberry sauce, as it needs time to solidfy and I've had the experience of failing and making a very watery cranberry sauce before. Not this time, though; it looks and tastes great! The recipe I used was from Betty Crocker, as are most of these -- for you Swedes, think of Betty Crocker as Den Rutiga Kokboken and Findus all rolled into one. Anyway, here's the link: Cranberry-orange sauce. I'm sure it would be copyright infringement if I posted the full recipe here or translated it, but I can't imagine it's bad for me to link it and give tips or say what I changed. In this case I used frozen cranberries, as I was unable to find fresh ones (add that to the less-available-than-2-years-ago list). Where it says in the recipe to boil until the cranberries "pop," it gives a much more violent impression of the process than what actually happens... after 10 minutes of boiling I had to sort of squish the cranberries myself in order to get them to open up so the pectin would get out. This is probably what made the difference between a watery cranberry sauce last time I attempted it and a good solid one this time.

Another super-traditional recipe for cranberry sauce can be found here. You can add some grated orange peel to it to give it a citrusy taste.

For those of you who have never eaten it before, cranberry sauce should be about the same look and consistency as lingonberry jam (lingonsylt). Like lingonsylt, we use cranberry sauce as a condiment for meats, almost exclusively for turkey on Thanksgiving (I have personally never seen it in any other context). Lingonsylt is a perfectly acceptable substitute for cranberry sauce, and the difference in taste is quite small -- cranberries are more bitter.

Now I have to run downstairs and make some pies. If any of my guests are reading this, and have also heard that I've been home sick from work, I want you to know that I'm washing my hands scrupulously and, though I'm heavily medicated, I am doing my best to keep strange objects and substances out of the food.