Thanksgiving Day 2012

Thanksgiving is a favorite holiday for the Pratt family!  We have spent quite a few Thanksgivings here in India.  Of course, it is not a holiday in India, but we enjoy sharing the history and meaning of Thanksgiving with neighbors and church people.  Usually the planning for the meal starts weeks in advance, so that I can search the shops to find the ingredients that I need, and then revise my menu when the ingredients are not available!  We try to make the meal as traditional as possible, though there are always some traditional foods that we do without. We were not able to have a turkey this year.  Brian found a local turkey, but they wanted to charge about $6/lb.  This, for a turkey that only weighed about 6 or 7 pounds, in other words, skin and bones!  So, we decided to have pork this year. 

Here is our Thanksgiving menu:
Pork
Mashed Potatoes
Green beans w/bacon
Corn
Homemade bread
Sweet potato casserole (for some reason the sweet potatoes here are greenish, instead of orange..weird)

The girls were a big help to me in the kitchen this year.

Desserts:
Raspberry Pie
Apple Crumble pie
Pumpkin pie (this is the first year that I've found real pumpkins here..Brian happened to see one in the
market one day.  I'm sure they've always grown them here, but I never saw them or knew what to call them in order to ask someone!  The skin is not the bright, orange color that we are used to for pumpkins, but the inside is orange and it has a pumpkin taste.  So, for the past couple months, I've been cooking and mashing fresh pumpkins and freezing it to use in pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie.)
Cookie Dough bars
Eskimos cookies
Sugar cookies
Thin Mints
Chocolate/orange cookies

A team effort

Coloring their Thanksgiving pictures

The completed art work

 Thanksgiving is an exciting and fun-filled day, but there is always a tinge of sadness at being so far away from our families at this time of year.  Thankfully, we were able to Skype with both sides of the family on Thanksgiving Day.  (Although, it was not necessary for my brother to share with us that they were having cheesecake for dessert!)

Happy Thanksgiving!