Sarah in Uganda

Step 1: Decide on a menu that includes foods found in Uganda but still in line with the Thanksgiving tradition in America. This is what we came up with: Turkey, Stuffing, Gravy, Green Beans (or as they call them here, French Beans), Mashed Potatoes, Pumpkin, Cajun Rice (this tradition was passed on to us but our mzungu friend Amanda who grew up in Louisiana. Plus we figured it’d be good to have some rice ready in case all the other food was inedible), and last but definitely not least, some sweet bread rolls.

Step 2: Search near and far for a turkey that is for sale. John took care of this step for us (for which I was eternally thankful) and after 2 days of searching found us a turkey to cook for the feast!

Elliot and Eddie with our turkey!

Step 3: Travel to Masaka market for all the ingredients needed. Then make your way home with 5 bugling plastic bags, one rucksack of potatoes, and one overstuffed purse of food and supplies in a Toyota sedan with 10 other people in the car. Only to realize we forgot a whole bunch of important ingredients and repeat the process again the next day.

Step 4: Thanksgiving Eve: kill the turkey. Our friend, Eddie, took care of this step for us since he’s Muslim and we wanted him to be able to eat the turkey with us. De-feather and de-organ the turkey while preparing the brine for the turkey to sit in overnight. The tricky thing about leaving the turkey to brine in Ddegeya is that there isn’t any refrigeration. Thankfully it gets pretty cool at night so by sitting the turkey in cold water and putting it in a dark corner we were able to avoid giving our guest food poisoning.

Step 5: Build an oven to cook the turkey in. All cooking is typically done over a charcoal stove but seeing as how this wasn’t really going to work so hot for cooking a full turkey, Elliot came up with the plan to build a brick oven. We found some bricks and stacked them 6 high before mixing up some mud and plastering it on the outside. Elliot also hammered out some sheet metal to serve as a makeshift top. We set 3 bricks inside to serve as a rack to hold the pot containing our turkey and then built charcoal fires in each of the corners. Having never really built a legitimate charcoal fire before, especially not one inside a make-shift oven, keeping the fire going for almost 6 hours turned out to be a challenge. It also becomes harder when every kid in the village wants a peek at this funny cooking contraption the mzungus have made. But we eventually got the hang of it and built up some good heat inside!

Oven pre-mud sealing

Step 6: Figure out how to cook the rest of the food over 3 charcoal fires. Thankfully, Rose, one of the nurses at the clinic, came to our rescue and helped us keep the fires going and prepared some of the side dishes.

Step 7: Take an emergency trip to Kinoni for an important forgotten part of the feast: wine! And also sodas for the rest of our guests.

Step 8: During our second trip to Masaka we spent a good portion of our time looking high and low for a meat thermometer. We finally gave up after asking the butcher where we could find a thermometer for cooking meat and he responded “Those exist?!?! No. You’re lying…. That can’t exist”. So yeah, we were left to guesstimate when the turkey would be cooked. At about 6 and a half hours of cooking in our wonderful oven, our turkey was finally done!

 Fresh out of the oven!

Step 9: Serve the turkey and other dishes, explain why we cooked all this weird food (the explanation went something like this: Well these silly mzungus went to America a long time ago and then it got really cold and their crops died and they were about to die but the Native Americans came and saved them and now we eat all this food to commemorate the Native Americans teaching us how to hunt and grow crops. The End.), share our thanks for all the wonderful people we have met during this experience and finally stuff ourselves silly with delicious Thanksgiving food!