faire la feast

feast
My Thanksgiving was probably the craziest Thanksgiving I’ve had yet. Usually the holiday is a quiet sort of affair, but mine ended up turning into quiet a party. The holiday began when, at four in the afternoon that day, my friend and I met at the Marche St-Eustache des Halles. We were planning on cooking up a huge dinner that night, and so had a long list of groceries to buy. We spent an hour or so going from stall to stall, and walked away with an enormous amount of food, including cheeses, baguettes, apples, spinach, mushrooms, sweet potatoes, nuts and olives, marshmallows and a whole rotisserie chicken. A second run was needed for the wine, and while my friend was out, I set about cooking. I sautéed onions, stuffed peppers, fried mushrooms, cooked spinach, and stuffed apples for about three hours.
My two friends returned, and it was at this point that things began to get complicated. With the oven going full blast, music playing, and the lights turned out, our fuse had gotten overheated. It began to short out, at increasingly frequent intervals, and, with only a half an hour before guests were due to arrive, we were feeling a little desperate. One of my friends peeled potatoes by candlelight, while I cooked the mushrooms with a flashlight cradled against my shoulder. Somehow, though, we pulled through, and the lights were back in working order as people began to show up.
Most of the guests were Parisians, or people we had met in Paris. Very few of us were Americans, and many of the guests didn’t really know what Thanksgiving was. They were happy, however, to eat the food, and were impressed by our culinary efforts. Most of the food we had prepared was pretty atypical to Thanksgiving, but we did offer a roasted sweet potato and marshmallow dish, though I’m fairly certain the Parisians found it bizarre. People continued to arrive and depart throughout the night, and the apartment was packed with people eating, drinking and dancing. The party lasted until six or seven in the morning, until finally only our group of three American girls remained. At last, we went to bed, happy that our party had been a success, and certain that we had showed the Parisians something of the spirit of Thanksgiving. Call us cultural ambassadors, making a difference one party at a time.