Thankful for food...

There are some areas in which I’ve become a stickler for tradition—one of them is Thanksgiving food. Thanksgiving, in my mind, is embodied by family and food; I can’t have the family since the Pacific Ocean and a lot of land separate us, so I better have the food! Since Thanksgiving is this week I thought I'd tell you about our menu--which we'll be enjoying Saturday since Thursday is a normal work day in this part of the world...

Chicken Legs: It would be near impossible to find a turkey here so we settle for the nearly equally rare chicken legs. This is my first year to have to cook them; I’m a bit nervous!

Cranberry Sauce: Sent across the Pacific by special request, it helps complete the holiday.

Fruit Salad: When I was a kid we always had a fruit salad that included coconut and baby marshmallows; over the past few years here I’ve stumbled upon a canned fruit mix that, when mixed with yogurt, marshmallows, and coconut (the latter two being from the States) makes quite a good substitute for the salad of my childhood.

Green Bean Casserole: For some bizarre reason, the past few years we’ve been able to buy canned green beans in one of the stores here in town. Cream of mushroom “whatever you happen to have on hand” soup is really easy to make from scratch, and my parents have been so kind as to send the necessary fried onions for the top. Yum! This year, although we’ve already got the onions, we haven’t yet been able to find green beans. There is one other place in town I can check—otherwise we’ll have to fill the casserole with something else!

Green Salad: This one is a bit less normal—the only green leafy thing here is cabbage, so sometimes we settle for a tray of veggies (cucumber, bell peppers—if they are being sold at the market, carrots)

Jello Salad: A nod to the mid-westerners in our crew; it’s a tasty mix of jello and fruit.

Mashed potatoes: not a problem since potatoes are so abundant here.

Rolls: Of course they have to be made from scratch here, but when you live in a place like Mongolia, you learn how to do things like that…

Stuffing: It could be made from scratch but the lovely mix my parents sent tastes so good!

And for dessert we’ll have Pumpkin and Apple pies. Yum!

So you see, we manage to be fairly traditional even out in the middle of Mongolia.

P.S. You'll all be relieved, I'm sure, to hear that the trial run for cooking chicken went smoothly and was delicious! (Okay, so it really was just another excuse to eat valuable chicken...but it was still good!) AND, drum roll please, on my hundredth lap around town I finally found green beans; so we get to have our lovely casserole tomorrow after all.