Thanksgiving with some Frenchies.

To anyone who has ever been a foreigner in the US, you may have realized that Thanksgiving is a very cultural event that comes with some serious obligations regarding traditions. Since this is my first time cooking an entire Thanksgiving meal, I started asking around to see, for example, what dishes I should make to impress my husband's entire family (from France, the haute cuisine capital of the universe). I was met with some good ideas (sausage in stuffing) and some bad (marshmallows in sweet potatoes). I decided to make an herb butter rubbed turkey stuffed with traditional stuffing (bread, spices, celery, apples, sausage), mashed potatoes, kale, corn pudding, corn muffins, roasted turnips and sweet potatoes, gravy, lingon (Swedish cranberries), pumpkin and pecan pie.

I got several comments about my Thanksgiving shopping cart. Why the English muffins? Because my French in-laws eat about 17 each a day. They LOVE them. Way more than they like corn muffins.

We recently had a conference in our department entitled "L'idée de la France/The Idea of France". The presenters, showing the instability and ever changing "Frenchness" from the Hexagon and other Francophone countries had nothing on my in-laws set-in-stone ideas of what is acceptably "French". Pumpkin is not human food in France and Antonia's great -grandmother told me first thing that "chez nous" they feed pumpkins to pigs. So with the baby food consistency and brownish colors of the food, the Thanksgiving feast wasn't exactly an easy sell.

Luckily I had my sister to help out in the kitchen. She's a comedian so she was happy to spend Thanksgiving in a place that no one would ask her for an impromptu stand-up or "roast" since she wouldn't have been able to do one in French anyway.

Everything turned out spectacularly I must say. And the meal was a hit (sort of). I can only imagine it was something like having Gordon Ramsay over for Thanksgiving.

Antonia LOVED the turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes!