No Turkey? No Lights? No Problem!

This Thanksgiving was a holiday of many firsts for me. Of course, it was hardly my first Thanksgiving in Ghana. Mus has gotten so good at this holiday I hardly have to make out the shopping list, though he does have trouble remembering the timing. (What day of the week is Thanksgiving again? he asks. A Thursday, I tell him. Always a Thursday.)

This was, however, our first Thanksgiving in our new residence, which is in a brand new area of Accra. All my other Thanksgivings I can remember with Mus took place at his mom's house on the other side of Accra. Even though they don't celebrate Thanksgiving here, his family would all gather and Mus and his mom would prepare something pretty dang close to a traditional Thanksgiving meal, and I would fry the corn flakes and we would have a homestyle holiday with a tropical twist.

But things change, and none of the family even lives in the old house anymore. Instead we're spread between two residences in two distant areas of Accra, and we're reduced to traveling across town to visit while we can. Furthermore, everyone's a lot busier now than they used to be; they have jobs or school, things that take up a lot of your Thursday time so you can't travel across town to celebrate Pilgrim-based midweek alien holidays.

So Mus and I settled for making a small Thanksgiving feast for ourselves and his dad, since we all share the same address, with a few leftovers stashed away in the fridge for May when she returns late from school.

But since Mus's mom, culinary master that she is, wasn't going to be attending, Mus and I, for the first time, prepared our Thanksgiving meal together.

Mus and I abandoned the idea of turkey years ago when Mus spent days searching the city for some turkey and ended up paying thirty bucks for a couple of scawny legs. Perhaps we would have had better luck in a village where we could have found someone who raises turkeys. In the end, however, there isn't much difference to me between turkey and chicken anyway, and chickens here grows (or at least roosts) on almost every tree.

So fresh chicken was on the menu, as well as cauliflower, instant mashed potatoes I brought from the States, fried cornflakes, and cookies. (Allow me to point out that I've yet to see a cranberry in Ghana. Stuffing baffles me, and I have a feeling I don't actually want to know what's in it, so I don't attempt. And pumpkins... well, they are here, but somewhat rare, particularly in the city. The only time I've encountered pumpkin in Ghana was in a village where someone- who apparently grew pumpkins- stopped by our house and gave me one as a gift in the middle of January. Unsure what do with it, I eventually peeled it and- with some degree of success- made soup.)

Our feast was planned and Mus and I had fun cooking it in what is definitely the nicest kitchen we've ever cooked in. However, there were a few glitches.

1. A- Between the time Mus bought the chicken and we ate the chicken, the power company really flaked on us. Meaning our “fresh chicken” was tossed in the freezer and spent several days in various states of freezing and thawing. Which meant that, when it was time to cook it, Mus cooked the hell out of it, just to be sure. The end result was harmless poultry that passed through the digestive system without a hitch, but it gave your jaws quite the work out.

2. We forgot to buy the cauliflower, so boiled cabbage and tomatoes were substituted.

3. Ants got into the cookies. Turns out, you can just brush them off.

4. But hey, the instant mashed potatoes came out perfect.

   
   

   And of course, the power went out about 45 minutes prior to meal time, leaving Mus and I to finish preparing dinner with headlamps strapped tour foreheads and snake lights wrapped around our necks.

Sweating profusely, we turned off the oven and served dinner at the first dining room table we've ever used for such an event. We had a cozy, candlit Thanksgiving dinner and you know what?

It was perfect.