Mystery Ingredients For Russian Thanksgiving Dinner

Living for a year in Siberia was bound to outcomes in a few laughs. There was no funnier time than my effort to celebrate Thanksgiving.

The Set Up

As an American male, my idea of cooking was dropping by the local Chinese restaurant on my way residence from work. We are talking about a person who considers cooking rice a culinary challenge of the highest order. This lack of skill came to the forefront even though spending a year teaching at a university within the Siberian city of Chita.

Thanksgiving

Experiencing the Russian culture was 1 of my primary factors for moving to Siberia. Experiencing the American culture was apparently 1 of the prime reasons the University hired me. These conflicting view points resulted in each Russian and American holiday becoming celebrated, even if it wouldn’t have been otherwise.

As the end of November approached, I began obtaining questions about Thanksgiving. My Russian peers and students had been especially thinking about the idea of Thanksgiving dinner. In turn, I started asking seemingly innocent food related questions and was pleased to find out most of the required food items had been not obtainable within the local marketplace. This included turkeys, cranberries and so on. Then I created my mistake.

Since the ingredients weren’t accessible, I began to mouth off about the injustice of missing Thanksgiving dinner. Oh, how I could cook a turkey. To poor everyone would miss out on it. The moral trifecta of justice, fate and karma rose up to put me in my location.

The uncle of someone’s brother was flying in from Moscow. If I produced a list, he would buy every thing and bring it on the flight.

I was in deep, deep trouble.

Reverting to the times of my youthful indiscretions, I right away did what anyone in my situation would. I emailed my mother for aid. The first response was, “Very funny. You’re going to cook?” After explaining the scenario, I received a extremely long list of instructions written at a third grade level. “This is really a knife” and so on…

Nicely, the magic day came and everything went shockingly well. The turkey tasted like turkey. The stuffing tasted like stuffing. Heck, the cranberries even came out red. Then it was time for the gravy.

In Siberia, you do not obtain ingredients in pre-packaged bags. Instead, you buy everything in a clear plastic bag with no label. In theory, you need to arrange everything at house so you know what it is when it comes time to cook. Therefore did the flour adventures once more.

Cooking directions were read. Turkey juices went into the pan. Instructions had been read. Flour went into the pan. Directions had been read. Constant stirring was undertaken. Directions were read. Water was added.

Feeling cocky, I then did a tasting sample and practically choked. The gravy was incredibly salty and exceedingly chunky. I added far more water, but there was no change. For the next 20 minutes, I kept adding water and stirring. The gravy just kept finding chunkier, tasted horrible and truly began to smoke!

Soon after awhile, 1 of my female students came into the kitchen to uncover out what was going on. She blanched as she tasted the gravy. We went through the instructions and I created a passing reference to my suspicion the flour might be poor.

She took one have a look at the flour and started laughing. Hysterically. She was laughing so tough she couldn’t tell me the reason in English and my Russian was fairly bad. She recovered after a couple of minutes and gave me the English translation.

I had grabbed the stuff employed to paste over holes in the wall, not the flour. Put yet another way, I was producing turkey drywall.

No wonder it was so chunky!

After the crowd left, I repaired a door knob hole in my bathroom. Thanksgiving lasted for months!