Consistent with prior years, Thanksgiving in Switzerland is always a great time as its brings all of the expats together and creates the challenges of trying to make traditional American food with limited ingredients. This year I had 3 Thanksgiving; it was a great fun, but I had my full of Turkey by the end of the month.
Thanksgiving 1 - Pulley - 11 Nov.
For the first Thanksgiving of the month, the Geneva and Lausanne crew celebrated at Bryan and Lauren’s in Pulley. I made green bean casserole without French fried onions, cream of mushroom soup, or pre-grated cheese so I had to get a bit creative and make many of these ingredients from scratch. We had about 25-30 people and dinner was great.
Thanksgiving 2 - Chalet Nitz - 22 Nov. (Thanksgiving Day)
I hosted Thanksgiving for the PwC expat group on Thanksgiving day and we had 26 people; note that my place is much smaller the location from the 11th. Luckily, I was able to borrow extra chairs and tables from others that lived nearby.
For the dinner, I made Turkey (actually 3 given the size of the ovens and Turkeys in Switzerland). The procurement of the turkeys involved having a friend drive me to the neighboring country to purchase the turkeys and bring back to Switzerland; I cooked one the day before, one the day of, and Vince made the 3rd.
Hosting dinner went well as everyone brought something to share and we had way too much food (there was an entire turkey extra)!
Thanksgiving 3 - Geneva - 25 Nov.
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, another friend hosted a 3rd dinner for about 10 of us. For this event, I made chocolate cake; only issues with this recipe is there are no chocolate chips or boxed devil’s food cake so both were made from scratch.
Great celebrating the holidays with these great groups of people! Although, the rest of the world needs to learn that Americans do not work on the Friday following Thanksgiving.
