El Día de Gracias

The Pavo in the Pila

I am sad to be so far from my family this week as they celebrate Thanksgiving in Boston, but am looking forward to sharing some of the culinary traditions with Guatemalan friends. I was never really into the celebrating the history of thanksgiving anyway, so I’m doing my best to keep celebrating the food. While it’s not too hard to find a lot of the foods I'm used to preparing for a Boston Thanksgiving, the number of guests has rapidly grown. So the challenge now is just getting everything cooked in my very small kitchen. (For example, the turkey doesn’t fit in the oven. Thanks to my neighbor and Thanksgiving guest, Eloisa, for offering her oven).

Joining me, Lucas and Omar at the apartment will be our neighbors Eloisa and Furio with their sons Diego and Emilio. Higinio, a friend of Lucas and his family (not sure exactly who, but there should be six), and probably my old Spanish teacher Ana and her husband Estuardo. I think that gets us to 15!

I’m looking forward to this Thanksgiving truly being a celebration of the harvest. Thursday morning we’ll be helping Higinio and his family, who live on the edge of town, with their corn harvest. Well, Lucas will be helping them. I may need to stay put in the house if we actually want to eat the turkey before midnight. But I’ll have my opportunity to help harvest on Sunday when they’ve scheduled the harvest for Higinio’s mother-in-law.

The menu will be pretty traditional:

• Turkey (plans for another neighbor to slaughter one of the turkeys she keeps in her yard fell through. We sadly resorted to Hiper Pais, a Wal-mart owned grocery store, to provide the bird)

• Mashed potatoes, the highlands of Guatemala are potato central.

• Sweet potatoes-made with camote- a very thick skinned, pale fleshed potato that grows closer to the coast. I will be making my mom’s traditional sweet potato and marshmallow dish, into which she usually puts a bit of crushed canned pineapple. I’m taking advantage of being by the equator and am going to try and use the fresh stuff. We’ll see what happens. Apparently marshmallows are hugely popular here, as they seem to be available (and on oferta) in every grocery I go into.

• Green beans- it appears to be the end of the season here, as they’ve been harder to find at the market and seem a bit tough, but they should do.

• Salad—I refuse to give up fresh, leafy greens as many extranjeros do. I come armed with a bit of biocide and some hopeful thoughts.

• Cornbread stuffing—I am obviously in the motherland of corn cultivation right now. But apparently masa, the cornmeal used to make tortillas, tamales, pupusas etc. is slightly different than yellow corn meal I’m used to cooking with. It’s hard to explain exactlt how it’s different. All I can say is that my cornbread tastes a little bit like a tamale. But add enough turkey grease, carrots, celery etc. and I’m sure it’ll be tasty.

• Cranberry Sauce- From a can, sadly. No cranberries to be found, even at Hiper Pais.

• Rice and Barley Salad—When I moved in to the apartment there was a large bag of organic barley someone had left behind. I’m finally going to put it to use combined with the small package of dried cranberries I found at an odd bookstore in town .

• Apple pie-apples are in season here and I found some nice firm ones that taste a bit like Galas. Not too tart, but again, combine it with enough butter and sugar and what could go wrong?

• Pumpkin pie—I was honestly thinking of skipping this one in favor of something a bit more tropical, but one of the guests who spent a few years living in Colorado and experienced a few Thanksgivings stateside is eager for his kids to try the pie. I was going to roast a pumpkin or “elote” but got a little lazy when 1) I began to think about the size of my oven and 2) I saw a can of Libby’s pumpkin at evil Hiper Pais. At this point, the canned stuff is probably more “authentic” than roasting your own pumpkin. So that’s what I’m doing.

• Zapote Pie—this was an invention of mine last time I was in Guatemala and wanting to make something reminiscent of a pumpkin pie. Zapote is a fruit widely cultivated in southern mexico and on the Guatemalan coast. It looks like an oversized sweet potato with a rough, brown skin. But inside, the flesh is the deep orangey-pink color, smooth, slightly sweet. If avocados, papayas and sweet potatoes came together and had a baby, it would be a zapote. The zapote will be pureed like a pumpkin pie filling, but I will add a bit of coconut milk (somewhat like the Casuela pie common in Puerto Rico) and the crust will be a butter, shortbread of crushed macadamias and shredded coconut. If it’s a success I’ll try and post the recipe.