Merry Thanksgiving and Happy Christmas!

For any of you who have ever lived abroad, you know that food becomes an obsession after a while. In any lengthy conversation with other foreigners here, conversation inexorably turns to food -- where to find specialty foods in Kigali (like, say, pringles), tweaked recipes for making comfort food with things you can get at the market, or hypothetical "you just got off the plane in Nashville: which Mexican restaurant would you go to, and WHAT WOULD YOU ORDER?" This made planning for Thanksgiving a very big process. A letdown on this crucial day could make us keenly feel every moment of the 10 months we've been away, and a success could soothe us with the gentle embrace of the food coma.

I went to celebrate Thanksgiving in Kigali with the other – almost all the other – volunteers. Ahmed had managed for find, buy, kill, and transport a turkey down from the mountains, Tom made a dead ringer for cranberry sauce with pineapple and lemon rind, and Meredith and co. made more mashed potatoes than I have ever seen at one time. I think we were all a little shocked once it was on the table – an honest-to-God Thanksgiving dinner, cooked mainly by Thanksgiving amateurs. I have never been in charge of more than the vegetable tray, and this year I pulled off green bean casserole, cake, and gravy. Every single thing was made from scratch, and was amazing by any standard (even grandma would be proud of Tom’s stuffing). Moreover, we were all so thankful to be together, speaking English and cooking in frantic solidarity, thankful for our surrogate family and for every bite of food. Honestly, the blues over not spending the holidays with family didn’t set in until Friday morning.

I got to involve my parents a little, though. I asked for a cake recipe from mom, and dad sent me a scanned page out of her cookbook, with the recipe circled and with notes in her handwriting. It’s called Mexican wedding cake in the book, but I call it my Rwandan Thanksgiving Cake.
Mix together:
2 cups flour
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp baking soda
About 2 ½ cups chopped pineapple or a 20 oz can of crushed pineapple
1 cup nuts (mom uses walnuts, I used macadamia)

Pour into greased 13x9” pan and bake at 350 for about 40 minutes
The recipe called for cream cheese icing, and being unable to find cream cheese for less than $8 a package here, I changed it up with:
1 stick butter, ¼ cup orange juice, and enough powdered sugar to make it the right consistency.

This was made in a borrowed oven, one that only had 2 settings: on and off. So yeah, I burnt the top of the cake. But I did manage to pick off the worst parts, and when I yelled "who wants burnt cake pieces with leftover icing," no one was complaining, and they disappeared quickly.





On Saturday, we head out on our Christmas adventure, and I hope it will be as good as Thanksgiving.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!