Thanksgiving 2007 Style
A Special Thanksgiving 2007
What do you do when you are far from family, friends, and home and it is an important traditional holiday time? You will miss family of course, but you surround yourself with new friends, talk about home and family, and then try to celebrate the holiday best that you can.
Today, November 22, 2007 we did just that. We celebrated with two other American couples and six very special Canadian couples. Basically, this was our “hooker” group with three added couples who now have unofficially become honorary “hookers”.
Several days ago the three American couples, us included put out the invite to our Canadian friends to come to our pad for a traditional thanksgiving celebration. All accepted, and each couple offered to bring a dish to share. Of the tree American couples, Kathleen and I, and Ken and Debbie offered to each cook a 10 lb turkey. The other American couple Jim and Debbie would come up with some pumpkin pies. Neither turkeys nor pumpkin pies were going to be an easy find in this foreign land. Jim and Debbie were planning a run to Puerto Vallarta to take care of some business and would stop at Wal-Mart. Kathleen and I were also headed for Wal-Mart and would try to find the turkeys. Jim and Debbie stopped at Wal-Mart early in the a.m. and found that they didn’t have pumpkin pies but they had some fresh made excellent looking apple pies and with satisfaction that they would do they left to go conduct their business and would stop to pick them up on their return toward La Penita later in the day. To make a long story short they returned to Wal-Mart in the afternoon only to find that all those good looking apple pies were sold out.
Now the story about the Turkeys! Kathleen and I found the section of Wal-Mart where the frozen turkeys were located and they were pretty well picked over but a few remained. They were very different looking and even though they were packaged much like the traditional butter ball from the states something was just not right. The price for one was confusing because as near as we could figure the exchange rate from pesos to dollars, these birds were going to cost us about $26.00 to $27.00 each. The packaging was in a dark rapping rather than the traditional see through that we were accustomed too, and of course everything about the bird was in Spanish.
Ken being a pretty good chef and myself wanting to show my abilities at roasting a bird were going to have a little friendly competition with us each doing our thing and we were going to make fun of it. Kathleen and I selected two equal weight birds, finished the rest of our shopping, and headed back for La Penita and the RV Park. We dropped off Kens bird apologizing for the price we had to pay, but what else could we do, after all they had probably been trucked a long way to get them this far into the tropics, where for sure not a lot of people were in to doing a traditional thanksgiving thing anyway. Kathleen and I proceeded to our RV. A few minutes later Ken showed up at our door to let us know that he had just figured out why they were so darn expensive. The turkeys were precooked and mesquite smoked. News of our mistake spread quickly in the RV park and for the next 24 hours we took some good natured ribbing as our guests would stop by with tongue in cheek to wish us well with the turkey preparation and to let us know that they hoped we didn’t get wore out with all we had to do to bake that bird!
The turkeys did require a finishing treatment of about 40 minutes at 300 degree’s and both Ken and I made the best of it.
Our guests arrived and like always no matter the country of origin or place of celebration the food quantity was more than enough and the quality of dishes to share were outstanding, and get this, many agreed that for future celebrations when a turkey was called for they might just go looking for a precooked, mesquite smoked bird, as it was very juicy, tender, and tasty.
The afternoon was filled with good eats, pleasant conversation, more than enough good beverages, and the fostering of friendships that will only become stronger as our time here in La Penita continues to play out.
Thanks to our Canadian Friends, and the other two American couples for making this a very special day.
Click below on the word Photo to be taken to an album of photo’s depicting the day. Enjoy!
