Thanksgiving Feast?

Just not quite what I expected…
This has become my mantra, I believe! Although I KNEW the meal would not be Mom’s Thanksgiving meal. I had sure hoped and dreamed that it would at least come close. HA! I’m really not even surprised! Just yet another chance to chuckle at our experiences here in India!

The whole day just didn’t flow like Thanksgiving – which didn’t really surprise me. We are in India, after all! First clue, it’s nowhere near sweatshirt weather. But the flow was disrupted way before dawn… Jamie came down with a fever Thanksgiving eve-night. So he was out. Joey ate something horrible for his system and was throwing up all night, Thanksgiving eve-night. Anna wet her bed. Alina got up for water and turned every light on… all before 4:30 AM, such is the life of a mom!!! Then I actually had a really good run at 6:30 am. Really, the run was so nice. Air was “cool” in comparison to the typical mornings. So we looked forward to the evening to see who was well enough for the ”feast”.

Our Thanksgiving did have family. My grandfather, yes, grandfather, came to Chennai for Thanksgiving. He turned 94 on Saturday, somewhere between an office in Hyderabad and a board meeting in Mumbai. We are a welcome side visit. It’s wonderful that he is here and even better that the kids appreciate him being here. Before he arrived I had already started avoiding the Thanksgiving meal. I really just couldn’t “wrap my head” around the whole concept. The first talk I had with him, he would only be in Chennai for a mere 36 hours. I just couldn’t see cooking the whole time (and searching for the ingredients for the 3 days prior!) So we decided to find a hotel offering the Thanksgiving “feast” (Alina’s word!). The larger hotels usually have really, really nice restaurants. Sure enough my friends with contacts tracked down three hotels with meal offerings. Funny, they really didn’t advertise at the school. I’m thinking, as a PR person, that would be the target audience. Go figure. There is one hotel “way down here” near us – yes, we are way, way far away from “downtown” or “the city”. We opted for that one – it’s only a 30 minute (if that) drive vs the 1 hour + into “the city”.

Greatgran, Joey, Alina, Anna and I got all dressed up and headed out for our “feast”. We were the first to arrive (at 7PM) they gave us the set menu, we read through it and recognized the offerings… well, I wasn’t excited about the Chicken Liver Pate but it came with a “salad” so I ordered that for the kids. They are my salad kids. And contrary to popular belief, we eat cold salad here (ok, only at a couple of the better restaurants) I ordered a mushroom thing, it was nice. The pate arrived, HUGE bowl of it – the kids dutifully tried it, yeek (“no, thank you, mom”). And that salad, the goal of the order, wasn’t even a sprinkle of lettuce on the top!! Oh well, strike one. Butternut squash soup was lovely. Of course after being burned by the pate… no way would the kids try it!! Then the main course… Turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and giblet gravy…says the menu… potential. With a dramatic wait for the main course… it arrives as a lovely presentation that Mom would not have recognized. Greatgran and I enjoyed it as it was…Mashed potatoes and scraped off turkey was actually nice, said Alina & Anna. But they forgot the gravy and had some serious giblets!! Joey deemed it quite lacking. And sadly, the cranberry sauce was a drizzle over the top, lost forever on the pretty presentation. Strike two according to the kids! But there was one last hope… pumpkin pie. Again a dramatic wait… it arrives… a mysterious orange mousse… they called it pumpkin pie. Strike three.

Even though we take time to give thanks for the gifts God has given us, enjoyed the company of family, it really does seem to be about the food. So I have vowed to do the “real meal deal” for the next holiday – which may happen to occur on our own little calendar. And now, I must make a pumpkin pie for some of my Aussie friends, who also happened to go to the same hotel to try out the Thanksgiving “feast”… It was a good day… fevers broke, Greatgran talked & children listened and we are truly thankful… even if the pie wasn’t quite what we had expected!