I started my shopping the week of and quickly learned being in France would make everything much more difficult. I started at the Monoprix in center city, comparable to a small Walmart, and ended up going to the Géant at the mall after Monoprix failed me, comparable to a large 24 hour Walmart. For instance they don't have roasting pans with racks. I had to buy a pan and then build a contraption out of an old cooling rack for baking and some string. They also don't seem to have thermometers for checking food temperatures which I found just absolutely bizarre. I even asked a sales associate and while he knew what I was talking about, they didn't have any in stock. They weren't sold out, they just didn't even have them in stock. They don't have basters. They have similar syringes for pastries but they were way too small.
As for pre-prepared food stuffs, just forget it. I had to make everything from scratch. No canned cream of mushroom soup, breadcrumbs, or fried onions for the green beans, no precut stuffing size bread cubes, no half and half, no poultry seasoning, nothing. The smallest turkey the butcher had was 12 lbs, cost 45€, and it didn't come with giblets!
There were tons of people I wanted to invite but a lot of our friends have family and I would feel weird inviting someone but asking them to leave their spouse and children at home! But we just don't have enough room for families, we only have a counter for a table and it only seats 4, plus the apartment is definitely not child friendly. I plan on buying a fold out table to set up in the living room when we have more people over, but my small scale Thanksgiving was already quite expensive so I didn't want to add extra expenses on top. In the end we invited JN as he was our first friend we made coming here and helped us out so much in the beginning when we were overwhelmed and lost. He was bragging about his Thanksgiving dinner to his friends and our mutual friend, Martin, jokingly asked if he could come over. Considering the amounts of food we had leftover, we said sure, why not, and that's how a fourth person entered our Thanksgiving feast.
All in all, everything came out okay. Considering this is the first time I ever did something like this, I would say it came out amazing. I forgot about my casserole in the oven so some of the fried onions got burnt and I left Jeremy in charge of mashing the potatoes and he over mashed so they were a little "gluey", and my gravy was a little bland since I didn't have the giblets but they were all very minor errors so the end result was still very good. Our friends loved it, and JN said it was the first time he ever felt drunk off food, which is a huge compliment to me! The one weird event was the next day the mashed potatoes tasted weird. My hypothesis was that since I had to make half and half out of whisking together whole milk and light cream, that maybe over night they kind of separated again because you could definitely taste the cream. I had never tasted cream by itself before. Due to the word being used the way it is, I expected something, well, creamy tasting, like milk but more buttery. In actuality it kind of tasted like something between yogurt and sour cream. On the night I made the mashed potatoes, it tasted fine, but the day after you could definitely taste that yogurt/sour cream taste. I also had half and half in the green bean casserole but that didn't change taste the next day. Maybe because the half and half actually gets cooked with the casserole while with the mashed potatoes it just gets warmed up and added in.
When everything was all said and done, this Thanksgiving cost us about 80€ ($85) and I spent literally an entire day prepping and cooking, but it was worth it. Next year will be a little cheaper since this year also included buying cookware and accessories we didn't have. It was definitely worth it and so nice to have a Thanksgiving instead of being depressed and missing home. Next blog I will go back in time and finally talk about Halloween!