My Big Fat German Thanksgiving Weekend

Thanksgiving was this past Thursday, and I feel like it has completely thrown me off schedule.  Leading up to Thanksgiving Day, when I would normally be scrambling to finish papers and lab reports before the break, was pretty calm and a completely normal week of school.  Tuesday and Wednesday were adventurous days in the kitchen when I cooked a pumpkin pie entirely from scratch.  It's amazing how much more time consuming pumpkin pies seem when you don't use canned pumpkin and a premade graham cracker crust, but I enjoyed the challenge.  Pumpkin is relatively new part of the German diet and not nearly as prevalent as it is in America (or so I've been told).  Right now, pumpkin soup is en vogue in Germany but the idea of pumpkin pie--Kürbiskuchen as my host teacher called it--is a pretty foreign and scary concept to them.

Kürbis in German is kind of a catch-all term for a lot of different gourds and squashes but more often than not refers to a specific type of gourd called a Hokkaido pumpkin.  Tuesday morning I bought two little Hokkaidos, cut them open, scraped out the insides and then roasted them in the oven.  After they cooled I scooped out the pumpkin flesh and pureed it with my roommates handmixer.  On Wednesday I continued my baking adventure and tried my hand at making shortcrust pastry dough--I was quite impressed with my handiwork!

  

The only problematic part of the entire adventure turned out to be my oven.  All of the recipes I used listed cooking temperatures in Fahrenheit which would normally be a simple conversion to Celsius, but my gas oven just has gas marks 1-8.  I found a website which listed approximate oven temperatures with German gas marks, but I'm pretty sure the oven was still a good 50-75 F too hot.  This caused my pie to cook entirely too fast and to souffle a bit and crack.  I still took it to school on Thursday with me for the teachers to try, and they all really seemed to love it except for one guy who unconvincingly said that it wasn't "too bad".

So back to Thanksgiving Day, after I was done with my classes for the day around 3:30 pm, I went back to my apartment and skyped with my family for a bit.  After that I went to run a few errands that ended up taking me past a few of the the recently opened Weihnachtsmärkte (Christmas markets) in Hannover including this crazy two-story nutcracker themed stall near Kröpcke.  After cooking dinner, I skyped a little more with my family, so we could do our annual drawing of names for Christmas.  In all honesty, missing Thanksgiving affected me a little bit more than I originally expected.  I think without the buildup to Thursday that you have in the US, it kind of just popped up out of nowhere--I was really glad I got to webcam with my family as well, but having them all in one room together laughing and carrying on made me realize what all I was missing.  I can't help but laugh at how 4,500 miles can suddenly make me realize just how much family traditions mean to me.  I am looking forward to Christmas here though because I can already tell how important Christmas customs are here.

So even though I missed my American Thanksgiving, I had a German Thanksgiving on Friday at Bill's apartment hosted by him and the teacher he lives with.  She ended up having to work Friday morning, so I went over to Bill's in the morning and helped him prep a lot of the food.  We ended up cooking quite a feast for one of his English classes and a few other assistants here in Hannover.  These pictures are of me and the Chinese assistant and the second is of me supervising Bill carving one of the turkeys after I myself gave up.

 

 

Bill and I started to drink the bottle of Rioja I brought around noon or so, and by the time I we were done eating I was starting to feel pretty good (just extra holiday spirit, right?).  Sara then stopped by after working late, and we stayed up pretty late talking and goofing off and cleaning up a bit.

Saturday was a bit of an extension of the holiday weekend.  I woke up early and baked another pumpkin pie with my leftover pumpkin puree, and then Bill and Sara came over for brunch.  After hanging out a bit, we trekked out to visit my host teacher Martina in Langenhagen outside of Hannover.  We ate lunch with her and then she and her two daughters (and her daughter's friend) tried my pumpkin pie 2.0 which was much better than the first after I corrected for the oven temperature and reduced the amount of ground cloves I used.  After that we played this called game called Wizard which was actually really fun, and I feel like at separate points both of her daughters got over their shyness a little bit.  After making our way back to Hannover and saying goodnight to Bill and Sara, I went home to my apartment where I actually got to listen to the Carolina-Clemson game on streaming online radio...all I can say is Go Gamecocks!!!!!  It also figures that as soon as I leave the country, we finally beat Clemson which I guess makes up for the second half of the season.