Canadian Thanksgiving

So October 9th, for all of you who didn't know, was Thanksgiving in Canada!

Our newest teammate and the most recent "guy on couch" at our apartment (aka. the Youth Hostel -- 8 euro/night for sleepover, 12 with breakfast) Dante, decided to make an epic meal to celebrate it. He is an Italian/Canadian dual citizen and has been teaching high school English for the past two years, for the people counting at home. Fortunately for him, he was the guy on the couch for only a few days and now lives in a hotel room above Johannesplatz (the main central plaza of Buhl).

So yeah, he arrived at 10:45am. He was the second person to ring the buzzer, which chronically woke me up Monday morning. The first was our neighbor. He buzzed us so I could go downstairs and pick up my roommate Matty's boxes of items purchased from my new favorite website "www.steepandcheap.com". [he got a cool pair of sunglasses and acidentally ordered 2 Jansport 5200 cubic cm internal frame backpacks - long story]

Anyhoo, I answer the door and in he walks with three MASSIVE bags of groceries from our neighborhood grocery store, the Handelshaf (which we affectionately call the Hasselhoff). He had thought that he had purchased the largest duck that they sold. It turns out, however that our 5.8 kilo "hans" was actually a goose. You see, turkeys are hard to come by in this region so we improvised. Now it is important to mention that none of us have ever cooked any large bird before, especially since most of us are the family jocks who often initiated the family football game (or frizbee game in the case of the California Reaughs), and none of us had prepared any meal on this scale before. Dante created a tomato and vinegar-based sauce from scratch, which he poured over egg pasta, made a huge green salad, garlic mashed potatoes, secured several loaves of French bread and purchased 2, count em 2, apfel struedels for us to eat for desert. To top it off he bought a bottle of his favorite Italian wine Rustico. IT WAS DEEEEERISCIOUS!!!!

The meal was almost a total success, with one exception. The gravy.

I will now give you some gravy facts:
1. My Mom makes the best Gravy I have ever tasted, hands down. In fact, scholars believe that my Mother's gravy provides an even stronger bond then the one made by friends who drop Jelly Bellies during Peer Gynt and plays a key role in our continued invitations to spend Thanksgiving with the Cornets.
2. For those of you who don't know, Gravy is hard to make if you lack a few key tools including:
a sieve
a whisk
a good saucepan
foresight.
3. If you fail to make the lumps become gooey fatty goodness, they can end up looking like either "brains in a bowl" or like something else you would have to eat on "Fear Factor".
4. Ten euros is not enough money to convince our German Roommate Korwin to eat "brains in a bowl".

I hope that all of my friends who live north of the contiguous 48 had a wonderful Thanksgiving Day and had better success with their gravy then we did!