Turkey Day India 2009

Every year the Expat's in India have a Thanksgiving dinner. We try to work with the ingredients that we have here to make it is authentic as possible.

This year Marsha and Bill had offered to let us use their flat. It was very nice. Plenty of seats and a great dining room for serving. It was sit up as a guest house. 12 people joined us for the Thanksgiving in India dinner.

We had several shopping trips out to find stuff that we needed. We never did find brown sugar, coconut, marshmellows (what's Thanksgiving without marshmellows on the sweet potatoes) and countless other things.
So the stuffing was made from scratch down to the drying the bread and fresh spices from India. I had 1 box of jiffy corn mix, but at least we had 1. The dressing was awesome.

Marsha a job well done!

I took most of my kitchen over to Marsha's to prepare for our Expat dinner. We worked and laughed all day. We had purchase two turkey's from Mumbia.



Our biggest surprise came when Bill got the turkeys out of the refrigerator.

When Marsha had checked the turkeys a day before the dinner, to see if they had thawed out, she had called and said "They have feet on them".

There are alot of people that eat the feet. So it didn't seem to strange.





So when we went to unpackage them.

Under their wing was their head.

What an unexpected surprise.

We said this is not a "Butterball"!

So we worked on getting the heads and feet removed from the turkey's.




This is a picture of the turkey's before we started cleaning it up ready to cook.

Not alot of fat on this turkey. The skin was tough. We put one turkey into a large toaster oven, and the other we cut and put into a pressure cooker. It didn't matter which one, they were both a little tough.






Bill helped us with the turkey's, so that they looked like normal turkeys like when we get them in the US.


Bill a job well done. You were so much help!

We couldn't have done it without you.





We had plenty of turkey. It was a little tough but it sure tasted good. The menu was Turkey, dressing, giblet gravy, I had shipped over cranberry sauce, so we had all the basics.

The rest of the menu was sweet potato souffle (since no marshmellows), green beans, broccoli, potato salad, deviled eggs, rice, cucumber and tomato salad, hot rolls, I made two pumpkin pies and we made an apple pie.




Everybody said that they enjoyed the dinner. There was nothing spicey or Indian.


Marsha and I are not even getting out of bed today.

MONKEYS

We had monkeys. MAMA monkeys.

Each one of the monkey's have a very small baby and there were a lot of very small young monkeys with them.

Look how small that baby is.

Just a swingin'

This is how I spend most of my days, sitting on the balcony of the bungalow and swinging!

New Boys - Camden & Ethan

What a great job!

Cade and Camden = Priceless!

Ethan James - 2 Months old = Adorable

Ahmedabad Friends

Going away parties are a norm for Expats in India. Someone is always going somewhere else. Tonight it was Alex's turn.

Alex from the UK is going to Brussels so we had a party for him.

Vernelle from Trinidad and Gsjibert from the Netherlands

Blake from Chicago, John in background also from Chicago and Licia from the Netherlands

St. Kitts

Standing on our balcony at the Marriott at St. Kitts in the Caribbean. My very first island. Atlantic on the side that our hotel was on, where the waves were high, and the Caribbean on the other side (within walking distance) where the water was warm. Such a beautiful place.

Of course we had to put the monkeys on our heads. Devesh, our company's COO and I was at the beach when we found these babies.

Traffic Jam

While driving down the road in Ahmedabad India. We had to stop for a train. The traffic consisted of this camel. Notice the camel next to the brand new car. The camel has the right-of-way, so he got to go first across the bridge and over the train tracks.