There is no Thanksgiving in Cuenca. Most of the people in the city have never heard of it and almost none of them have ever experienced it. It's so far off the radar that not only did we have to work all of Thanksgiving week, there were parent-teacher conferences scheduled for Thanksgiving night and the American director of CEDEI told us that sometimes you've just gotta go without celebrating American holidays. Well fortunately, those parent-teacher conferences got rescheduled off of Thanksgiving and since Leslie wasn't going a full year without celebrating Thanksgiving we decided to host a Thanksgiving dinner party at the Coloma's house for the CEDEI School staff. All the other American teachers were really excited and all wanted to bring a dish or help out in some way and the Ecuadorian staff was excited as well although they had no idea what to expect. In fact, I don't think as many of them as came were planning to come until I started advertising the party by talking about how much time Leslie and I were spending cooking all the traditional dishes.
We started dry-goods shopping on Monday, Leslie having decided on the menu at least a week in advance. We were going to cook a turkey (15-lb. because those things are expensive down here, a couple varieties (four casserole dishes) of dressing, green-bean casserole (2 dishes), real macaroni and cheese (2 dishes), mashed potatoes (big serving bowl), sweet potato casserole (1 dish), biscuits (like a ton) and pumpkin pie (3 pies). And Livia made two incredible corn casseroles as well. Jen also came and made some Ecuadorian fruit juices and we invited people to bring wine or Coke if they felt the need, because dinner parties in Ecuador are almost always pot-luck parties. And after at least five shopping excursions, six hours of cooking on Wednesday night (because we had to work Wednesday) and five more hours on Thursday of cooking and getting the downstairs ready and the music together right up until the party started (because we had to work on Thanksgiving day as well), we had 21 people come to the party plus us two plus the Colomas who only got a chance to try the food before they left for their own party. They were very gracious about letting us use the house for our party (after all we are paying them to live in the house) and Nellie even helped us clean all the dishes after everyone had gone. Angel said that Leslie's cooking (because in all honesty she really did all the cooking) was so good that he couldn't appreciate the food they were served at the party they went to.
All-in-all, the party was an incredible success and definitely worth all the labor that went into it. Even cleaning until 1:30 in the morning on Thanksgiving night, because we couldn't leave the cleaning until Friday (because we had to go to work) and because there's no dish-washer in the Coloma's house. Fortunately, we used almost exclusively plastic plates, cups and utensils and all of our baking dishes were aluminum Reynolds-style disposables so we avoided a lot of cleaning that way. All the food was delicious, including the purple sweet potato casserole that ended up being purple only because that's the color sweet potatoes are in Ecuador. I hope to be able to post pictures from the party soon so that you can see how much fun everybody had; unfortunately I can't do it right now because I'm at our hotel in Otavalo that only has internet in the lobby and only when the internet feels like letting you connect. The pictures will be up soon.
Everybody enjoying the food.
Trying to pose for a picture.
A good group photo of most of the people who came for the party.
The more chill last-minute crowd. We just hung out, drank wine and listened to '70s rock music for a couple hours.
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