San Givin

For those of you who thought the biggest challenge I’d taken on this year was getting on that plane back in September and leaving everyone I love for eight months, you were wrong. It wasn’t until last Thursday at noon that I faced my biggest fears: cooking a Thanksgiving dinner for 12 guests. To be completely accurate, this experience did not actually begin at noon on Thursday. For anyone who’s ever cooked a turkey—and a frozen one at that—you’ll know that it could not have possibly begun 8 hours before the guests were promised dinner.

So let’s start at the beginning. I gather that would be when my loudmouth self began blabbing to everyone I liked here that come November, I was going to invite everyone to my flat for a big dinner to celebrate an American holiday called “Thanksgiving.” “Just you wait!” my foolish self said. “You’ve never seen a Thanksgiving dinner like this one! You better come hungry!” So you see, I brought this on myself; I have no one to blame but me.

Given this self-incurred predicament, I decided to roll up my sleeves and get to it in the only way this 21^st century girl knows how to: by consulting my sacred source of knowledge….The Internet. I began my online research with a simple query: “How the heck do I cook a turkey?” As it turns out Google and YouTube ended up being my saving grace last week. Without Google, I wouldn’t have known that you need to budget about 1 lb of turkey per dinner guest, 1.3 lbs if you want to have enough for turkey sandwich leftovers the next day. Google also taught me that if you’re cooking a frozen turkey that weighs oh about 8-10 lbs, you need to budget at least 2 days of de-frosting. If you don’t have that kind of time, Google assured me that I shouldn’t worry. All I had to do was buy a fresh turkey. And in case I did happen to decide on a fresh turkey, then Google had a list of brining recipes all ready for me. So helpful, that Google.

One of my Google hits was a Youtube video of a chef from Whole Foods showing me how to actually roast a turkey step by step. That was enough to hook me and I spent the next couple hours (at the office….oops!) watching video after video about how to truss a turkey, lather it with butter, stuff it, roast it and carve it. I watched an elegantly dressed woman daintily sprinkle oil over her turkey and a big guy smear butter all over his turkey. I even watched a semi-disturbing video of some guys who stuffed a Cornish hen inside of a chicken, stuffed the chicken inside a turkey, then sewed this turkey into a roast pig and covered the pig in BACON. I love meat as much as the next carnivore, but like I said, mildly disturbing. (Or maybe what was disturbing was the fact that the video made me want to both gag and taste the damn thing.)

Armed with the knowledge acquired from cooking websites and how-to videos, I set out on Tuesday afternoon to do my food shopping. I first went to a bookstore that I’d discovered has a section dedicated to selling specialized cooking utensils. Nestled between the travel books and the historical fiction books, it is quite possibly the most randomly placed kitchenware I’ve ever seen. One minute you’re looking at Lonely Planet guides and the next you’re suddenly contemplating salad misters (Apparently it’s something like a spray bottle but designed for misting things with olive oil. I took this to mean that those of us who just plain drizzle olive oil on our salads are somehow inferior cooks.) My internet research had taught me three crucial lessons about cooking turkeys: 1) You need to truss turkeys in order to ensure even cooking. Truss is just a fancy word for tying a turkey’s legs together and tucking its wings under the body. If these parts are too far away from the body and breast, they run the risk of overcooking; 2) A meat thermometer is the only way to know whether a turkey is done; and 3) A turkey that hasn’t been brined should be basted. So I bought cooking twine, a meat thermometer and a completely unnecessary baster. (Why didn’t I realize I could just use a spoon to throw the turkey juices over itself? That’s really all basting is. But no, in Diana’s world the shopping is done first and the thinking second.)

I then made my way over to the first grocery store. I mention first, because I in fact ended up driving a circuit of FOUR grocery stores and supermarkets looking for fresh turkeys. No cigar. Absolutely none of the grocery stores in all of Durban seemed to carry fresh turkeys…they each had about 5 frozen birds, clearly catering to us Americans. So that solved the problem of finding a pot large enough to brine my fresh turkey in….frozen turkey it was. (I later asked my co-workers and all of them agreed with my findings; they’d never seen a fresh turkey for sale anywhere in Durban.)

I ran into a few more hitches at the store. First of all, I’d forgotten that the sweet potatoes sold in Durban are white on the inside and less sweet than the sweet potatoes I’m used to. Nevertheless, it’s not Thanksgiving for me without some sweet potato casserole so I crossed my fingers and threw them in my cart. Also, it turns out that besides fresh turkeys, the other thing one cannot find in ANY Durban food store is canned pumpkin for baking, oh say, PUMPKIN PIE. I had to sadly cross that off my list after my epic 4-store grocery run yielded nothing. I started wondering whether Durban itself was conspiring against Diana’s envisioned Thanksgiving dinner.

Thankfully, at this point, I was joined by a friend, another American girl who was interested in helping me pull off this cooking heist. She convinced me it would still be Thanksgiving with only apple and pear pies instead, and in any case there was no time for grumbling. We still had to buy all the vegetables for the side dishes and Durban supermarkets close at 7 PM remember? After scurrying around, we managed to get everything we needed and made plans to meet the next night after Zulu class to do some prep work.

Which is exactly what we spent three hours doing on Wednesday evening. She came over to my flat and we peeled, sliced, diced and marinated the night away. Around 11:30 PM, I nearly fell asleep on a head of garlic I’d been chopping and decided to call it a night.

Which brings us to the actual game day. (Ironically, it was a Thanksgiving sans football so I mean that purely symbolically.) I’d planned to leave work at noon, but by 11:45 I was so excited/anxious to start cooking, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore and slipped out. On the drive home, I was haunted by alternating visions of a still-completely frozen turkey and a completely burnt turkey. I started seriously questioning my decision to invite 12 people to come witness and possibly suffer through my first ever turkey-cooking experience. Aren’t I a researcher this year? Shouldn’t I have done a controlled trial say, a month ago or something?? By the time I got home, however, I’d given myself three pep talks and felt better. I turned on some soothing salsa music, changed out of my work clothes and dived in.

Remember that post where I let slip that I name inanimate objects? Well, I considered naming my turkey seeing as how I got so intimate with it, but decided against it at the last moment…I was going to slice it up and eat it in a few hours, after all. Not naming it, however, did not pre-empt me from talking to it…out loud… for the next 7 hours of cooking. “Alright Turkey, time to get lathered.” “Ugh, Turkey, you’re actually heavier than I expected!” “Ohmygod Turkey don’t fall!!!!” Note to self: turkeys turn into slippery little buggers after you’ve lathered them with oil and butter. In any case, I didn’t drop it, thank God. I did manage to truss it after only a couple of failed tries and stuffed it with some of my favorite veggies. (I’m not really a bread-based stuffing kind of gal so I’d opted to stuff my Turkey with garlic, onions, carrots and little bit of thyme.) When I finally placed it in my teeny oven, I sighed with relief, then realized that had taken my clumsy self waaay too long and it was time to get cracking on the sides.

My friend arrived a couple hours later, thankfully, and got to work on the pies. Together we somehow miraculously managed to finish everything by 7:30 PM, just in time for the arrival of the guests. Another friend had also arrived early and helped me bring in the patio table and rearrange the furniture in our flat such that by 8 PM, we had a long family style table, able to seat all of us, covered with food. We lit candles, poured wine and out came Turkey, all cooked and golden!

As we all held hands, lowered our heads and spoke one by one about what we were thankful for, I realized I was a lucky, lucky person. I miss everyone back home on pretty much a daily basis, which has often made this experience hard for me (despite my upbeat tone on this blog). But at the same time, I have already been blessed with good friends and surrogate families in this country. What more can I ask for in a year abroad?

Oh and for those of you wondering, South African sweet potato is just as tasty in a casserole if you’re liberal with the brown sugar and apparently, people liked Turkey because there were no leftovers left at all.