Expat Creativity: Devising Substitutes for Traditional Holiday Eats

Living in foreign lands now for more than 4 continuous years, I’ve obviously celebrated many holidays without benefit of the full array of traditional eats normally enjoyed on such occasions in my native land. Especially so when it comes to the traditional fare of a U.S. Thanksgiving dinner. It’s often been quite the challenge to unearth even a facsimile of the ubiquitous turkey, dressing, cranberries and pumpkin pie.

Indeed, two years ago I was scheduled to be aloft en route from Thailand to Myanmar on Thanksgiving Day, so… the best I could come up with was to board my morning flight toting a somewhat soggy turkey sandwich purchased at “Subway” in Bangkok the day before. As we hovered at 30,000 feet, leastwise I had a (o.k. utterly pathetic, but nonetheless) smidge of “Thanksgiving” to chow down on in lieu of the Pad Thai noodles proffered for my in-flight meal.

 
Come to think of it, I seem to have been “en route” to someplace most every Thanksgiving since 2011 – 3 years ago I was apparently on an overnight bus in Vietnam slurping pho at a rest stop.

And the year before, though stationary – alas my Thanksgiving dinner was arguably the worst yet:  fast food at my laptop in Ho Chi Minh City, as I struggled with yet another CELTA teaching assignment.
 
 

Ah but the good news is that this year I’ll be tuckin’ into a true-blue U.S. of A. turkey dinner with all the trimmings (a family-style dinner served at a local gringo restaurant here in Cuenca). We’ll enjoy all the usual Thanksgiving fare – save for the one particular item that nobody here in Ecuador seems to be able to lay hands on. Two words:

Actually, I did manage to unearth two cans of the “jellied” variety at the gringo supermarket here in Cuenca last year (though alas, I checked yesterday and found nary a single can on the shelves). Fortunately, I’ve been hoarding my two precious cans of the jellied variety all year, and have benevolently offered to donate them both to the restaurant so that each of us can at least have a dab of cranberries.

But still…

The truth is, I’ve never liked the jellied version, and much prefer my Turkey-day cranberries made with whole berries, not the bland “jello” variety. But apparently fresh cranberries are another elusive here amid these towering Andes mountains, and the only option is dried cranberries.

Thus I became hell-bent on a new culinary mission. A courageous mission to somehow whip up a reasonable facsimile of my childhood whole-berry cranberry sauce – using dried árandanos (cranberries).

Armed with the following ingredients:

…along with this recipe which I gleaned from some obscure online cooking forum:

…I was determined to concoct a tasty clone of my favored chunky whole cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving. I mean, how hard could it be?

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find cornstarch (nor truth-be-told, did I have the heart to search for it) but surely a bit of flour would work to thicken. I also wasn’t sure if I could lay my hands on allspice, but I did (by some miracle) happen to have ground nutmeg which is similar, no? Oh and while I couldn’t find orange marmalade, I opted for “mora” (blackberry) instead (which I thought might be even tastier). In any case, I was game to give the recipe a try.

And the result?    Ta-daaa!

Cobbling it all together was actually quick and easy. And once cooled, the consistency is very close to what I remember dumping out of a can in the U.S. The taste too, proved yummerishes – tart enough to impersonate fresh cranberries, yet just sweet enough to my liking.

In short, hot-diggity – yet another success in creatively adapting to life as an expat!