So Thankful

Celebrating an American holiday in a foreign country is tough! First of all, it's not that much fun spending holidays away from family. Second of all, this country does not carry about half of the ingredients we needed for a traditional Thanksgiving meal and lastly, due to the time change, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and football games were all 6 hours behind for us so they were not playing at the appropriate time of day (total first world holiday problems)!

We started off our Thanksgiving holiday by prepping  what we could the night before and turning on a festive candle to get in the Thanksgiving Eve spirit! Lily also made us watch the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving movie for about the 30th time this month.



On Thanksgiving morning we woke up bright and early to have a festive breakfast of cinnamon rolls made to look like turkeys. I am a sucker for a holiday themed breakfast for my little lady!




After breakfast, it was back in the kitchen to get to the real cooking.



We ended up making stuffing, turkey breasts, gravy, mac & cheese, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, rolls and sweet tea. Honestly, it all tasted ok but nothing was quite right.

We don't have cheddar cheese in Morocco so the mac & cheese was off. We also don't have real corn meal here so the corn bread stuffing wasn't quite right texture wise, but had good flavor. Our oven is too small to make a whole turkey and we didn't need one for three people which is why we just went with turkey breasts.  They were actually really good! The Moroccan version of sweet potatoes are not the same as what we have in America so the casserole was a white color and not sweet enough. Danny made a valiant effort on the green bean casserole with his fresh green beans, made from scratch cream of mushroom and homemade french fried onions (none of those things are available in a can here) but I think I prefer it with all the processed goodness it is normally made with which is saying a lot because we really don't eat many processed foods. Just goes to show, don't mess with perfection!



We spent the rest of our day relaxing, putting up the Christmas tree after Lily's nap and watching Christmas movies!

You will notice that our tree skirt is actually a sheep skin from the sheep that our driver's family slaughtered during their big holiday a couple months ago. The family had it made into a rug for me and it looked perfect under our dinky little tree. We like to merge cultures around here.



We are now in Christmas mode!