Thanksgiving is in the wrong season for turkey in France. After going to all the supermarkets within a 30 minute radius, I had to ultimately abandon my search for dinde. French turkeys don’t start appearing in supermarkets until December, and there aren’t frozen turkeys year-round like at home. Franchement, turkey is the scarcest meat in supermarkets – usually you can only find cutlets, but if you’re really lucky they’ll have a couple of legs. Corinne even called the local butcher for me, to see if he or any of his butcher friends had a turkey for me to buy. Pas de chance.
So, I’m going to have a Thanksgiving with chicken. The birds here are much smaller, more along the lines of a large pigeon, which means I’m probably going to have to buy at least two. I’m heading to the supermarket again in a couple of hours to buy the last of the ingredients. I’m surprised that I found cranberries, although they’re tiny and in liquid, so I have to buy pectin to try and make it into a jelly. Stuffing, gravy and pumpkin pie are likely going to be the biggest challenge…the pumpkin pie is probably going to be scratched altogether since even regular pumpkin is next to impossible to find.
Maybe I’ll get lucky and find a turkey at the last minute, but I’m not getting my hopes up. Of the 8 other people I’m cooking for, four are French and two are British so they don’t know what Thanksgiving is anyway, the only other American is a vegan and my Chinese neighbor has never even had turkey. Eh bien, je n’ai rien à perdre!
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