Life since Florence: Part I

Life since Florence. That's a big one. A load of things changed just in the few days of that school trip. And a few things stayed frustratingly the same... But the biggest news following Florence was Aleja and Nahin! The cutest Columbian couple in the world, of whom I have about 5 billion photos on my Flickr site because they are now attached at the hip. So adorable!

But other than that there wasn't much excitement in the world, so... Aleja and I made Thanksgiving dinner.

WARNING: to moral audiences, stop reading now. This is blatant self-plagiarism from the article I wrote and submitted to my school's newspaper Spyglass, because I was too lazy and uncreative to rewrite it all here. Forgive me, Ani.

Thanksgiving dinner. It was a week late and took two days, it cost a fortune, and half the ingredients were substitutes, but by George we made us an Italian Thanksgiving. Upon inspection of the Italian supermarket, Aleja and I discovered that they have in fact nothing that could be considered Thanksgiving-worthy. Cranberry sauce? No. Sweet potatoes, squash, yams or the like? Not a chance. You know, I tried to explain sweet potatoes to my host mother, and she simply had never heard of them. She kept asking, “How can potatoes be sweet? How do you do it without sugar?” So Aleja’s mom sent us a can of rather dead looking but still delicious sweet potatoes. Some things you can only get in the States.

Among that which we had sent to us was stuffing and piecrusts. Italians have all heard of stuffing, in association with that mysterious American holiday Thanksgiving, but they don’t actually know what it is. As to piecrusts, well, all I can say is wow. Wow. There is no such thing as a piecrust here. When you ask for one, you will be presented with a package of round spongey bread things. You know what they do with them? They spread Nutella between the layers. That’s not a pie, I say! So Aleja and I, planning to make five pies but having had only three piecrusts sent from home, were forced to improvise. That entailed getting some square pans from the local supermarket, some Graham cracker-like cookies, and a few eggs; we ground up the crackers and made a goopy concoction out of them and the eggs (“hmmm... two eggs seems about right”), and lined the pans with them, then popped them in the oven for a little while and hoped for the best. And by god, the pies turned out amazing: we had two pumpkins, an apple, and two lemon meringues. The crusts were not only edible, but delicious.

Which leaves us with the turkey. That’s sort of a must-have at Thanksgiving, right? Well, funny story about that. See, there aren’t really turkeys in Italy, and what with this avian flu rampant, chickens are marvelously cheap... so we decided to make ourselves a Thanksgiving chicken. Since the chickens are positively microscopic, about a third the size of a turkey, we got two, and set about stuffing them. Did you know that Italians don’t necessarily de-foot their chickens before selling them? Cutting off the legs of our Thanksgiving chicken will probably be one of my strongest memories when I come back from Italy. It didn’t help that Aleja and I could hardly stop laughing at those awful yellow feet sticking up off the poor chicken; we attempted to cut away the extraneous limbs between spasms of laughter.

But at last the chickens were de-limbed, stuffed and cooked, and aromatic Thanksgiving scents began to fill the kitchen. We had cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, corn... absolutely everything! But what made it really priceless was how hard it had been to get everything put together. Admittedly we’d gotten help from our parents back home who’d sent us stuff, but we’d had to improvise as well a great deal. And the very idea of creating this celebration in another country and actually carrying it through to a grand (and delicious) finish is thrilling.

Okay, plagiarized part over. So it was a pretty awesome Thanksgiving dinner, despite all challenges presented us by being in Italy. In fact, that was half the fun. So rock on. Happy very late Thanksgiving, everyone!