Our Thanksgiving

Since Finland does not celebrate Thanksgiving we had to wait until today to have our first Thanksgiving as a married couple. We cooked a whole chicken, sweet potatoes, dressing, green beans and had a an apple cake. I cooked all of the items from scratch except the green beans and cake. The green beans were canned and the cake was pre-made. They do not sell dressing here so I made my own with bread, onions, homemade chicken stock and some spices. The chicken came frozen with out the neck or gizzards. I soaked it in a brine solution for 24 hours, then stuffed butter in between the skin and breast and baked it. It was really good and juicy. The sweet potatoes are pretty large in the stores here so we cut them into cubes, boiled them and baked them with sugar and cinnamon. Everything turned out really well and we were pleased with our attempt at a Thanksgiving dinner.

Some of you may be wondering why I opted for a chicken and not a turkey. Well, they did have two turkeys in the freezer every time I went to the store for over a week. The only problem is that those turkeys were about $50! They were large turkeys but still, we cannot eat that much and that is most of our food budget for a whole week. So, I opted for the much cheaper chicken instead. Our Thanksgiving meal was not what we would have shared if we had been at home with our family but it was good and we made the most of what we have available.

We are glad to be here and are thankful of the support we have from our family and friends. We are also thankful for each other and the opportunities that we have. I hope that all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and were able to remember the reason for the holiday. We are also thankful for our football team as we are 3-0 against UNC under TOB! Way to go Wolfpack!

I am sorry that I have not been posting a lot lately, not much is going on here. I am busy with school work and Randall is busy with work. I will have more to post around Christmas as we are going to do about two weeks worth of traveling. Until then I may only post on Saturdays.