I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! We celebrated a few days early with some fellow expats. One of Pat’s coworkers is from South Carolina, and she invited us over for a Friendsgiving!

We had been feeling the distance a bit more with the holidays coming up, but Friendsgiving definitely helped! Nicole went above and beyond – she made SO much food and went to a lot of trouble to track down ingredients to make the typical American Thanksgiving meal. For example, German grocery stores don’t sell canned pumpkin but they DO sell a lot of whole pumpkins. So Nicole bought some pumpkins, baked them, and then used them for pumpkin pie!

I wish we would have taken more pictures, but when you’re having a good time, you forget to snap photos sometimes. Nicole made turkey, pie, and a ton of sides! I wanted to make green bean casserole because it’s Pat’s favorite, but unfortunately the grocery stores here don’t sell anything like cream of mushroom soup. Instead, I made another one of Pat’s favorites: potatoes au gratin. I used this recipe from the Pioneer Woman. I was able to find most of the ingredients and made substitutes for German products where I could. Potatoes au gratin was pretty easy to make because cheese and potatoes are readily available at all grocery stores here.

After hosting Thanksgiving the last two years, it was a little nice not to have to worry about the turkey 😉 We had such a great time, and in true Thanksgiving fashion, ate way too much and needed to take a long nap. The only thing missing was Lions football!