Thanksgiving is for Turkeys

Well, since I wasn't going to be in Australia for Canadian Thanksgiving, I held it last Sunday at my house and invited my friends to come and partake in their first ever Thanksgiving dinner. On the menu was of course - turkey, which I might add is not easy to find in Australia it appears as they are not big turkey eaters. I had to go to the butcher and get one of his two turkeys in the freezer. He had one very large one, about 27 pounds, and another that was about 10 pounds...I took the 10 pounder, and that was nearly $40 as it was. Holy shit. The rest of the menu was as follows:

• sweet potatoes
• mashed white potatoes
• corn souffle
• buttered carrots
• cranberry sauce
• dinner rolls
• and let's not forget the homemade stuffing with Canadian summer savoury (thanks again Joanne
• and for dessert - figgy duff with rum and brown sugar sauce

We literally pigged out. It was fabulous. And while we were eating we went around the table and everyone spoke about something they were thankful for. The common thread was that we were thankful that in coming to Alice Springs from away, as we were all new recruits this year, we were all pretty thankful to have found such good friends to share our time with. 

     The dinner preparation was not without a few snags...this was the first time roasting the turkey in a gas oven and the gas flame went out. The oven is new and it doesn't continue to spew gas when the light was out, but I didn't notice for a time that it was out and when I went to baste the turkey, the oven was barely warm...oops...crap. So I cranked it up and finished the bird off, no problem. The next issue was with the figgy duff. I had to buy a tea towel to wrap my steamed pudding in as I lost my pudding bag in the fire last year. I was quite pleased with the texture of how it turned out and wrapped it snugly in the tea towel and chucked it into the boiling pot of water. Then I saw the egg. The egg I had forgotten to add to the pudding. CRAP! So I had to yank out the soggy pudding bag, open it up, slop the pudding back into the bowl and mix the damned egg in. Then slew this bit of sloppy pudding back into the towel, tie it up again and chuck it back into the boiling pot of water. I was not optimistic about how it would turn out, particularly given no one had ever heard of figgy duff or knew what it was meant to be like. I did not want a dunce pudding. Turned out it didn't matter - the pudding turned out just fine, and we powered through it all, declaring it wonderfully nice, particularly the sauce made with Aussie Bundaberg rum.

     After dinner we sat around through the turkey sweats and watched a couple of movies before calling it a night. Thanksgiving in Oz was a success!