grazie

Grazie is the Italian word for thanks. For many years, it has been a tradition for my family to all go to the beach on Thanksgiving and cook dinner at the beach house. I love doing this. In fact, because of this Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and I was not looking forward to missing it, as Italians do not celebrate the American holiday of Thanksgiving. I knew my mom would not enjoy Thanksgiving this year either, as her entire family would be in Genova (my sister and her family were visiting us). So my mom and I had agreed that we would postpone the family Thanksgiving until December and just celebrate when we return to the states. Then I was informed by Silvia that our family and the students would be cooking a Thanksgiving dinner and that all the Italians would be invited, as this was how it worked every year. At first, the students were a little put off that they had to cook Thanksgiving dinner for forty or more people, including Italians who don't even celebrate it. Some didn't even want to participate. Then we decided to make it a huge, fun event. Dave cancelled class and we decided to spend the night before and the entire day preparing food. Each student decided to take on a traditional Thanksgiving dish and some even chose to make two or three items.

I decided to make pumpkin pie, as it is one of my favorite foods. I thought it would be pretty easy and I could spend the rest of the time monitoring and helping the students. But it turned out to be a little more of a challenge as the ingredients were not exactly comparable to the US ingredients. In fact, this turned out to be the case for many of the ingredients. But we were having fun and decided just to work with what we had and everything turned out great. The boys (Andrew, Patrick, and Holden) all helped make the pumpkin pie. I made the crust ahead of time, but they made the entire pie themselves with my supervision. It was a little yellower than normal and a little thicker than normal, but in the end it tasted delicious.

And all the students really came through and made so much delicious food that we ended up eating leftovers all weekend. The Italians loved the food (or at least said they did) and a really fun time was had by all!