Thanksgiving is by far my favorite holiday. I used to hate it. All you did was eat in the middle of the day, and then get stuck eating the same food for the next week. And there were no presents. Not a cool holiday. Now, being an older, wiser 21-year old college student, I appreciate the beauty of a 4-day weekend right before finals start. It's not only a much needed break during a time when you're about to go out of your mind because you haven't had a break since classes started (especially if you go to an evil liberal school like NYU where we don't even take off for Columbus Day-- HELLO! He discovered America!), but if you're like me you're probably running out of clean clothes and are too lazy to do your own laundry... hey, it's been a long semester.
Well, this semester being in Ghana, I barely go to class and all my clothes are sort-of dirty just because there's dirt everywhere here. But that doesn't mean I appreciated Thanksgiving less.
Leading up to the big day, there was lots of speculation as to what the meal would actually be. We'd get turkey, but would it be like the chicken is here, all stringy and tiny because it was allowed to run around its whole life and was malnourished? Would we have mashed potatoes, or would we get mashed yams, which are not nearly as satisfying? Are there cranberries in West Africa? Well, this was all solved and thanksgiving actually turned out to be quite a success for having an American holiday in a foreign country. Dinner was catered; no green bean casserole and there were raisins in the mac and cheese,(as I was eating, I kept thinking that the food on my plate was mixing until i was informed that yes, they were crazy and put raisins in the mac and cheese. Not a fan of that) but the rest was delicious. I even carved the turkey! I somehow managed to sit at a table with all vegetarians, so the few of us meat eaters gorged ourselves on that poor bird; there was nothing left except the weird rice stuffing by the time we were finished.
All of us students were responsible for desserts and we totally rose to the challenge. I signed up to make my mom's caramel oatmeal bars, which I thought would be really easy until I realized they don't sell caramels in Ghana. My friend Katey, who's been responsible for all culinary masterpieces and birthday cakes this semester, offered to help me to make caramel. It was a freshman year gravy moment: at my sorority Thanksgiving, I was in charge of mashed potatoes and gravy, but I had no idea how to make gravy without having the turkey. My sister Rachel looks at me and says "You can make gravy? I thought it just came in a can". I looked at her horrified and said "It comes in a can??". Again, I had no idea you could actually make caramel. Apparently its pretty easy though, all you have to do is melt down and brown sugar. We had some struggles melting it down since all I had to use were sugar cubes, which in hindsight probably is what caused most of the trouble, but we ended up with something that looked and tasted like caramel. The final resulting bars, while they mostly stuck to the baking pan and only the middle ones would come out, ended up being a wildly popular and reminded me of being home for Thanksgiving.
I ended up eating way way way too much food and being grateful that I wore a skirt with an elastic band. I also couldn't eat food for basically the entire day after, so I consider Ghanaian thanksgiving a huge success. Even if there was no green bean casserole.
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