This morning we met up with an American co-worker of mine, Laura, and grabbed a train at about 10:30 for a little over an hour south to Lindau, the last German city on the lake before entering Austria. From there we met Jessica, a British landscape architect, before driving another 30 minutes to her house in Lindenberg for a Thanksgiving day of sledding and turkey eating. We grabbed some light food at the train station cafe and since the city’s Christmas market was opening up for its first day, we decided to browse the market for a bit before we left. Since Christmas is a pretty big deal here in Germany and all cities have Christmas markets, it is cool to be able to see them and begin immersing myself into the holidays. I love holidays.

After enjoying some fire roasted sugar covered almonds and doing a little bit of shopping, we headed to Jessica’s place. But on the way, we had to make a much needed stop at her boyfriend Achim’s Mom’s house to pick up the sleds. And we also had a look at the brown cows in the barn all tied up for milking with barely enough room to even lay down. They seemed very excited to have visitors and really wanted to lick us. We had a look at the babies too. They were pretty funny because they were looking for anything to suck on. If you stuck your hand out they would suck on it immediately.

With the sleds in the car, we were on our way. We got to Jessica’s and set about preparing the food while her boyfriend Achim was leaving his work to head to the store. Jessica began preparing the pumpkin pie (made from real pumpkin) while I prepared the orange and raspberry Jello mixture. The Jello was especially cool because Germany doesn’t have it anywhere, so luckily it came in my “thanksgiving in a box” package sent by my Mom from back home.

With the pumpkin pie done, the jello in the fridge with the Country Company Potatoes I had put together the night before (family recipe) and Laura’s southern style greens, it was time to get the turkey in the oven. Jessica had ordered a super good turkey in advance and before we arrived, she had stuffed it and gotten it all prepared for the oven. So in the oven it went and off we were to go sledding! That is, after much discussion of whether it was ok or not to leave the turkey in the oven by itself and wondering if we could see the window from the sledding hill should smoke start billowing out from the kitchen.

They have a great sledding hill just a few minutes walk from their apartment. It had been well-sledded and therefore was compacted to perfection. We had a great time sledding and the hill also had a bunch of kids with plastic sleds that were pretty entertaining to watch. The hill was pretty high, with a good slope and our sleds were fast.

After a good hour or so of sledding and then a nice walk around a beautiful frozen pond that we actually walked a portion ON the pond, we made it back to the apartment to finish up the cooking. The turkey turned out absolutely perfect and tasted great and my family-recipe potatoes were a huge hit. The massive amount that I thought for sure would be too much, disappeared in no time. It was a great day followed by a fabulous meal. Even though we weren’t surrounded by the traditional food and family we were used to, it all turned out perfectly and was really nice to be able to enjoy the holiday with our local friends and share food from our family recipes.