Canadian Thanksgiving...Czech Style!

Last Thursday we decided to host a Canadian Thanksgiving inviting our entire team over to the house for it. Crazy idea, yeah kind of considering I haven’t exactly had any experience cooking for 20ish people, and neither has Chelsa, who was the one behind the idea! But why not try? So first off this is a little difficult as you can’t exactly buy all the regular “Thanksgiving” type food here. Chelsa was able to order a turkey from a specialty store and we did find some instant stuffing (yeah I know the real stuff would better, but this is our first massive dinner), and have been on the lookout for sweet potatoes, which we did find.

It was a really fun and interesting experience to say the least. Chelsa did a great job preparing the turkey, thanks to some instructions from our friend Erin (she’s a veteran cook!) Although it was pretty funny watching Chelsa give herself a pep talk before working with the turkey as she’s not a fan of working with raw meat. We were just barely able to fit our 8kg turkey into our small European oven and found out that because it was a convention oven you don’t need to cook it as long. We were watching that turkey like hawks and were able to take it out before it was over done, and it turned out great!

We made stuffing, mash potatoes, sweet potatoes, gravy and had our friend Adrianne bring over some vegetables and Erin was amazing making three homemade pies! She even had a can of pumpkin filling and made pumpkin pie. That was unbelievable as you can’t by pumpkin filling here! Definitely a highlight for me! It was really funny as we had no idea when to start things as with our lack of let’s say zero experience of making big meals, we had no idea when things would be ready or if they would be ready on time. But we pulled through and had everything pretty much ready on time and just had to reheat a couple of dish.
The girls loved it and had a great time! We kind of had to force them to try some of the new stuff, like sweet potatoes but once they finally tried it they were hooked.

They really enjoyed the pies which many of them had never seen before. All in all a success! The night ended with some interactive games including charades and a massive game of hid and go seek in the dark. This ended with 9 people “hiding” on Chelsa’s bed and the bed breaking. So Thanksgiving ended up costing Chelsa a little more than she expected!


The girls gathered around the food


Enjoying the food!


Digging into the pies!


Arielle after eating too much!