Breaking Tradition

For Thanksgiving this year we decided to break tradition in a couple of ways.

The first way we broke tradition was in our menu choice. Rather than turkey or duck, we opted for roasted chicken. It's not often that we've had turkey for Thanksgiving here in Thailand, as imported frozen turkeys are expensive (about US$100 for a cheap one). While there are some turkeys grown locally, they are not that common—though I have seen some wandering around Kamalasai. The meat from these turkey's is likely not so tender, either. Another nice thing about the chicken is that it was a good size for the two of us.

We also had string bean casserole, without the fried onions and cooked on a stove-top. We were going to have mashed potatoes, but opted for mashed sweet potatoes since we had them. These ended up with a unique color because we mixed brown and orange varieties. The stuffing was more-or-less normal.

Thanksgiving Dinner

We always like to have sweet potato pie with our Thanksgiving. This ia a tradition we picked up when we lived in Alabama. Through the years, the nature of the sweet potato pie, though, has been a bit variable, depending on the type of sweet potatoes that we can find depending on where we have lived. In our slight variance from normal this time around, we used purple Japanese sweet potatoes. Taste is similar to the orange variety, but the color adds quite a different character to the final product.

Purple Sweet Potato Pie

Another way we broke with tradition is that we celebrated the Thanksgiving holiday twice. While we wanted to invite some Thai friends over for a traditional holiday meal, we have found in the past that our North American foods are not always appreciated by our Isaan friends. We have sometimes prepared lots of food only to have little of it eaten. So we decided to have a separate celebration and let our friends help decide the menu. The word hamburgers came up in the conversation.

Ingrid made some dough for the buns ahead of time using a zwieback recipe. Ngok and View helped roll out the buns. (Sorry, Mennonite friends, these zwieback did not have the cap on top.)

Buns, Ready to Cook

Finished Hamburger Buns

I was in charge of the meat. The charcoal cooker we borrowed was a bit small, so it took a while to cook all the burgers that I had made.

Grilling the Burgers

Ngok and View cooked the french fries.

Making the French Fries

We only had three people join us at the actual meal. Several people couldn't make it, but Ngok and View put together some plates for them.

Decorating the Burgers

In the end, we had a good time at both celebrations. After all, Thanksgiving is not about what we put in our mouths, it is about the God who provides good things for us to eat.

For every creation of God is good and no food is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.
1 Timothy 4:4 (NET)