Last Saturday, Brad and I went to the market and purchased sweet potatoes. They were hard to find. You’d think that somewhere in the 8 or 9 produce stands, that they would have sweet potatoes. But no…anyways, we finally found them (at the potato stand, of course).

We needed sweet potatoes because we had volunteered to bring a couple of traditional American dishes to the Thanksgiving dinner put on by HOST – a Christian organization that has an outreach to internationals living in Groningen. It is weird that we are now the “internationals” especially when those leading the group are mostly N. Americans. This is partly because the official HOST language is English, and for many of the internationals from other countries, English is a second (or third, or fourth) language.

There were three of us ladies making food for what we thought would be 20 people (it turned out to be more like 30). We knew that there would be limited cooking facilities so we made the food at our respective homes and brought it to the “banquet hall”. We had to make two trips with a friend’s car and since I went with the first trip, I could get a look at the kitchen to assess our limitations. I immediately called Brad and said “bring the microwave”! Needless to say, the kitchen left a lot to be desired. Thankfully, students have lower expectations about food quality than your average church potluck, so when the food wasn’t exactly hot when we were ready to eat, it didn’t matter.

The evening was quite successful despite a few hitches. Besides the lack of a proper kitchen, the person in charge of the turkey underestimated how much we needed because we were out of turkey after about 10 people. That also meant that we were out of gravy right away too! It was a little embarrassing. To her credit, it is not that easy to find turkey here in Holland, and she had to order it sight unseen. Apparently a “medium sized” turkey in Holland is different than one in America… it looked like a chicken on steroids, maybe 6 or 7 pounds.

Since we needed more gravy, I took the turkey carcass and started getting every last piece of meat off of it to get some sort of gravy drippings. I couldn’t help but think that that was something my mother would do – and I kind of felt a bit proud of myself. Meanwhile, Brad had started frying the pieces in a pan and produced something that resembled gravy in taste if not looks. It sufficed and we were back in business. If only we could’ve produced more turkey.

The other hitch of the night was that we also ran out of dish soap after only a few dishes were done. I should explain that the first of all the kitchen was very dingy and dirty so we had to clean the sink before cleaning the dishes. Secondly, the sink had no drain plug so we were improvising there too. You can imagine that the water was draining out as fast as we were filling the sink. We used whatever we could find for soap (i.e. hand soap from the bathroom) and called it good. I have to admit that I re-washed my own serving dishes again when I got home.

I think we definitely made an impression on the other internationals who never had this kind of meal before. Those from Asian cultures are shocked when they find out that all the Dutch eat are potatoes and meat. So imagine their surprise when they found out that it is also similar with N. Americans. We tried to explain the current and historical trends about Thanksgiving, but they got confused when we mentioned that it is also the biggest shopping weekend before Christmas.

Nonetheless, it was a Happy Thanksgiving had by all!