Thanksgiving

It seems everyone I talk with has been filled with curiosity about our Thanksgiving celebration.  Thanksgiving, believe it or not, is not an international holiday.  Why would it be?  Since Julie is from the US, and she grew up with American customs, Refuge Ranch does celebrate Thanksgiving.  Wednesday night, we started the cooking for Thanksgiving.  I peeled the sweet potatoes (camotes) with Martha's help.  Meanwhile, the younger kids who wanted to help were sent to the green beans with Vicky to break them.  After we finished our jobs, Martita took over the kitchen to prepare the pie crust for pecan pies.  I think we ended up with six or seven pies by the time she finished.  Sadly, I didn't think to bring my camera down for pictures, so I only have photos of the cooking on Thanksgiving Day.
Thursday, the real work began.  I was charged with the sweet potato casserole, and I made a special request home for a copy of our family recipe.
 

 I wasn't kidding when I said I peeled the sweet potatoes.  You can't buy canned yams here, so we pressure cooked the camotes Wednesday night, and I got to mash them Thursday morning.  I used the purple cup, which fit like a glove!

We wanted to use all of the camote that we had; the recipe called for 3 cups.  I had to measure out how much camote there was to know how many times to multiply the recipe.  I was able to triple the recipe, which is a LOT of sweet potato casserole!

 

In case you didn't believe me about there being a lot of casserole, this is one of those big aluminum pans that are used at church or school functions to serve potato salad or something like that.  It was a real challenge to get this thing up to the apartment so Adrian could cook it.

Here's all that I used to make the casserole itself.  The topping was a different story.

  Butter. This was the biggest struggle!  I needed 3 cups of butter for the topping.  Have you ever tried guestimating how much of a butter cube makes 3 cups?!
 








Cutting the butter was only part of the problem.  I couldn't manage to measure out the melted butter correctly.  First, I managed to melt 1/2 cup and I turned off the stove and rinsed my pot before I realized I was way below what I needed.  Then, I melted enough to take care of 1 batch of topping, but I was tripling the recipe.  My third attempt, I measured to the wrong line.  If you look at the cup-thing beside the butter, it's a measuring cup that works for dry and liquid ingredients.  I measured with the dry rather than the liquid.  Finally, I managed to get the butter I needed.

  Take a good look at the white bag beside the bowl.  THAT'S how much flour that we had!

Dinner was held for a total of 34 people, including Mireya's family, the Zaragozas, Cerino's family, Adrian and Vero, Vicky, Rosa, myself, Diana came home for the meal, and we also had Niyeli and Marisol.

 As a tradition, there is an activity that allows everyone to share what they thank God for.  In past years there have been cards, banners, and I'm not sure what else in the past.  This year, however, we had a "Graffiti Wall of Thankfulness!"

Here's one of the kid's messages.  "Thank-you God for my life and for being my father."









Another tradition around here is that the day after Thanksgiving, the family goes to get their Christmas tree.  We went up to the volcano, or around that area.  Can you imagine walking around to cut down a Christmas tree all the while dying to ditch your sweatshirt?  We had a great time, and got to have a picnic lunch and go play on rickety wooden bridges before going home.  Pictures will go up on Facebook since it's a bit difficult to put them on here.  After we got home, the family proceeded to decorate the tree and rearrange the house.  I went up to my room and got to have a nice visit with my family during this time, so there are a lot of decorating photos that I missed, but I wouldn't have missed the Skype call home for anything.  I got to see family that I hadn't seen since the start of summer at least.

Thank-you Lord for all that you've blessed us with, for the ability to see my family, for giving me family here, and for never leaving us, even when we wish you would!