In Soviet Russia, you give the Turkey salmonella.... just kidding!

Thanksgiving today! Something I am learning about myself – when a situation really requires a leader, I lead to the point of controlfreakdom. I guess LEP wasn’t for nothing. This happened with the St Petersburg trip, and definitely happened with Thanksgiving. Jon told us that sometimes students make a Thanksgiving, and that Vika can host it, but that the rest was on us – cooking, getting supplies, getting organized. Jenny was my partner in crime – we chased after everyone making sure they were all contributing and that they’d all show, and I signed up for the most important part – the Turkey.

Jenny and I had to find a special ‘American’ grocery store to buy the turkey(s), which were small (8lb) French ones. The turkeys (we needed 2 to feed all our 15 people) were purchased, and we Russia-style improvised, letting them thaw on Vika’s balcony (yes, outside) since no Russian refrigerator is big enough for 16 pounds of turkey. The next day we found Ashan, the giant Russian Walmart / Costco and successfully procured the only 2 sweet potatoes in Russia, we’re pretty sure. They’re super rare here – when we asked the produce people, and they had no idea what we were talking about. We ended up finding them in the exotic produce section, under these weird Vietnamese fruits that looked like pink and green koosh balls, no joke. That’s how weird sweet potatoes are to Russians. Also, vanilla extract is not sold here. Instead, weird powdered vanilla is. Okay, Russia.

Jenny and I trotted on to my house to make the sweet potatoes and sing along to Celtic Women Christmas carols. I’m not sure what to really call that dish – they were mashed sweet potatoes topped with chopped walnuts, butter, brown sugar (Another b**** to find) milk and stupid vanilla powder. We added cinnamon for good measure, even tho the recipe didn’t call for it. The recipe didn’t call for us mixing the topping with our bare hands either, but in Russia, you improvise. You also have to ask your host sister to light the oven for you, because you are American and pilot lights are scary.

This morning Jenny, Billy and I got to Vika’s at 11:30, the real getiin’-the-show-goin’ crew. Billy’s dish was to be stuffing, to be made while the turkeys cooked. Silly Billy (I’m sure he’s never heard that one before) bought approximately 6 LOAVES of bread to make into stuffing – we used two. Also bought like 10 onions, not exaggerating. I was afraid to even see the turkeys – I was sure they’d be either still frozen solid or green with salmonella from having defrosted on a freaking balcony. To my shock, they were perfect. Luckily, we had Billy there to be all manly and rip out the guts with his manly hands – though he did have to put on some game-time music on his headphones to get up the courage. And he did complain / freak out loudly. But I feel like it just added a nice touch to the atmosphere. No one wants to get that acquainted with a turkey’s intestine. Also, the turkeys’ drumsticks still had a few feathers on the ends of the bones, for decoration. French. After giving the turkeys a nice, creepy, oily massage, we stuck them in the oven and moved on to stuffing. The theme of this Thanksgiving was ‘let’s make dishes that we have no idea how to cook.’ Frankly, with the stuffing, we sort of just winged it. Cubed a ton of white and black bread, covered it with beaten eggs, then added sautéed onions and celery and vegetable broth until the bread was all mushy, baked it. Sounds simple. You’d never guess that it took us 3 freaking hours to do, lol.

In the midst of the stuffing-making, Jenny and I faced a pickle. Billy had gone out to fetch his girlfriend Natasha from the metro, and Vika had gone swimming, so Jenny and I were left alone in the apartment, needing to get the turkeys out of the oven to make a foil tent for them, but we had absolutely no clue where we could find an oven mitt. (A ‘hot-hand,’ Jenny, really?) We super-awkwardly searched the apartment with little luck – we had to use her bathroom hand towels. Russia. We also managed to knock an entire roll of toilet paper in the toilet in the process. We swear, we’re American, not special-needs.

Towards the end of 3 hours in the oven, I started getting panicky for the turkeys. Russia also does not believe in meat thermometers, so all we had to go on to tell if the birds were done was good instinct and cutting into the meat to see if there were any salmonella wormies crawling around in it. The turkeys, to the eye, appeared worm and blood free, so we just went with it. I was still super panicked when Jon was carving the birds, I was sure they’d either be dry as the Sahara or poison. Turns out, they were pretty legit. Win.

The aspect of dinner I was most skeptical for was definitely my responsibility for making turkey gravy. You must understand, my great-grandma makes the best turkey gravy, ever, ever. Like, I could live on this gravy the rest of my life. So my gravy standards are pretty high. And every time I attempt sausage gravy, its either burned, congealed beyond recognition, or completely flavorless. So I approached this, the staple of my personal Thanksgiving experience, with great deference to the cooking gods. Jenny and I performed a veritable chemistry lab on this gravy, making it in three rounds, and then something shocking happened. This mess of flour and fat and tears suddenly turned into… into gravy. I will never, ever be as impressed with anything I will ever create again. It was flavorful, proper consistency… gravy. Omg. I owe this success, I think, to the decision we made out of boredom a few hours before to use turkey giblets and heart and neck and stuff for something, so we boiled them with an onion for like an hour, giving us our very own made-from-scratch turkey broth. So not only was our gravy existent, it was actually made from scratch. As was, I now realize, our sweet potatoes (though not the stuffing, we used Russian vegetable broth mix and premade bread.)

Our fellow ACTRers started coming around 3pm, bringing all the proper dishes we were missing – Natalie did cranberry sauce, Chantal did freaking amazing mashed potatoes, Sarah brought more stuffing (oversight on our part, eesh), Paige made a fresh salad (the Russians freaked when they saw we were eating raw vegetables, particularly mushrooms. ‘Is it safe?’ one even asked us), Audrey made a tower of bread and plenty of butter, the boys brought plenty of champagne. Katrina and Lilia had us covered on desert – Yule log cake and carrot cake, respectively. For the last half hour we were all bustling around the tiny kitchen occupying ourselves with something. I was organizing the finished dishes on the table when I saw one cast-iron pot that I didn’t recognize, on the stove. Lifting the lid, I was hit with a violently boiling something and a cloud of smoke. I slammed the lid back on and froze, an expression of horror on my face. Basically, we had put Sarah’s stuffing on the stove to heat up and forgot about it – it seems to me it was about 3 minutes from catching on fire. Jenny and I carried it to the balcony and examined it, but it was definitely ex-stuffing at that point. Sarah at that time was out getting Ben from the metro – Jenny had to break our retarded news to her. She took it like a champ, though. She regarded it as our sacrifice to the ‘Nothing in Russia is Easy’ Gods.

We arranged the last dishes on the table as Jon and Vika finished carving turkey number two, and I was overwhelmed with satisfaction. Jenny, Audrey and I always say, the trick to having successful times in Russia is to go in with low-to-no expectations that things will work out. We followed that rule, and indeed we were met, in turn, with a lovely dinner and our whole company of friends, without a single regret (well, if you don’t count Sarah’s stuffing.) Jenny and I beamed at each other and fist-pounded about fifty times. We all assembled our plates and settled in the living room and watched ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ Such a lovely movie, brought me to little happy tears at the end. The whole time I kept an eye on everyone enjoying their dinner, assuming my Grandpa’s role at home of calling out individuals: ‘Katrina, you’re not done eating, are you? We have way too much mashed potato left! Go getcha’ some more.’ We also had to throw in ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ for good measure.

An hour and a few cups of mulled wine later, we all headed home, laden down with leftovers (at least, the ones Vika didn’t want ;-) Jenny walked alongside me and noted, ‘dude, I think this means we’re grown-ups.’ That scared me a little, to be sure, but she’s kinda right. Eeep!! I’m okay with being a grown-up as long as I still get to have my non-Russian Thanksgivings at my grandma’s house, like they were meant to be!