Thanksgiving in Madrid

For Thanksgiving some of my friends from the Hamilton program who are all sharing an apartment had a Thanksgiving party at their flat. We were all supposed to bring something and since I have no oven I had to think of something besides a dessert to bring. I decided to make spinach dip, not very Thanksgivingy but people seem to enjoy it anyway.

The days leading up to Thanksgiving were spent going around with my friend Kaitlin to look for the necessary items to make different American dishes. There are two American stores in Madrid that are easy to find. One of them has a better selection of items than the other but they are both rather expensive because you have to import everything but you can get most things you need to make American foods. She was going on a pie marathon and taking pies to school and to the party and I just had to find all the ingredients for spinach dip. It turns out that you can use Queso blanco, or White cheese (Fromage Blanc) as a replacement for cottage cheese(which is the replacement for sour cream. It turned out very well.

For Thanksgiving day, we all converged on my friends´apartment with random food stuffs. I had also bought stuffing from the American store and some cranberry sauce eventhough we did not have turkey. Turkeys are available here but my friends just decided to get some roast chickens instead. By the time everyone was there we had : Chickens, stuffing, carrot/raisin thing, salad, a Columbian rice and bean dish, apple pie, pumpkin pie, toffe pie, brownies, smoked salmon appetizers, spinach dip, mulled wine, sangria, red wine. Apart from the four hosts, we had other assistants and two Columbian friends of Jamie and two of my host siblings from my study abroad here! My roomate Chantal has been more in touch with the host family than I have been and she invited them to Thanksgiving. I got to see Manolo and Cristina. It was really good to see them. They told me that they had eaten sushi for like a year after I left. hahaha. I will have to go over and do sushi with them again soon.

It was really fun to be with a lot of friends on Thanksgiving and eating good food. I´m glad that we got to have pie even if we didn´t have turkey:)