A Christmas-y Saturday around Zürich.

On Saturday afternoon my flatmates and I decided to check out the just-opened Christmas markets in Zürich, as well as to do some Christmas shopping. We started out at the Freitag store, which is a unique Zürich landmark built out of old freight containers. All of the items that Freitag sells are made out of recycled canvas from semi truck coverings, which means that they are all unique. You can climb up to the top of the store and get a view over part of Zürich, which is pretty interesting.

View from the top of the Freitag store.

Prime Tower.

Georgie and Stef.

The Freitag store.

After Freitag, we walked along the Viadukt, stopping in at the English cheese shop to get some cheddar. From there, we went to the Christmas market at the Hauptbahnhof, which features the famous Swarovski Christmas tree. (Only in Zürich, I think.)

We took advantage of the nice weather and walked along the river towards the lake, enjoying the Christmas decorations. Zürich is a really pretty city, I think.

There was another Christmas market at Bellvue in front of the Opernhaus, where we sampled gluhwine and watched the lights turn on.

We finished our tour by walking down the Bahnhofstrasse and enjoying the lights on the street. It was a really lovely day!

My first Swiss Thanksgiving.

I have been running really long experiments at work, so everything was really crazy in the week leading up to Thanksgiving. I had everything planned out on a timetable, so I was (pretty) sure that we'd be able to get everything done in time.

Thanksgiving Eve was the official start of massive cooking, clean and other preparations. One nice thing about doing Thanksgiving in a country where it isn't a holiday is that shopping is so much less stressful on the actual day of Thanksgiving, and the grocery stores don't tend to suddenly run out of the things that you need. My flatmates and I kicked off our preparations with a big trip to Coop to get all that we needed to make our contributions to Thanksgiving. Our fridge is really not that large, but thankfully it has been cold enough that our balcony doubles as a fridge these days.

Pies chilling on the balcony, since there was no room in the fridge.

We re-arranged and cleaned our flat on Wednesday evening, setting up our living/dining room such that we could seat 25 people. Paul also stopped by to drop off the extra chairs, some plates and a high chair for Jake.

Also on the docket for Thanksgiving Eve were making a pecan pie, blind baking a crust for the French silk pie and cutting up the dried bread for stuffing. Thanks to blind baking the crust before, it stayed right where it was supposed to and didn't migrate up above the filling!

Pecan pie!

I took most of the day off of work on Thursday, because there was just so much to do. I got up bright and early to start preparing the stuffing in eager anticipation of the arrival of the turkey, which Paul was going to pick up and drop off. Around 9.00, Paul showed up with some bad news: the turkeys were still frozen! Yikes!

After the initial freak-out, which may or may not have been exacerbated by the revelation that our combined 12.8 kg of turkey cost 180 CHF, I collected my wits and started a turkey defrosting attempt by bathing the turkey in warm water.

**Photo credit: Stef's iPhone.

After about 30 minutes of turkey bath, I just decided to throw the turkey in the oven and cook it for longer to hopefully get it to cook all of the way through. Our sink wasn't big enough for the turkey, so I had to continually rotate it, which meant that I couldn't really do much else at the same time, and I had other fish to fry.

With the turkey in the oven, I finished the stuffing, had a quick lunch and then dashed in to work to do a few important things that couldn't wait until the next day. Thankfully Stef and Georgie also took the day off, so they stayed at home, basting the turkey and starting on the cream of mushroom soup for the green bean hotdish.

I returned home around mid-afternoon, stopping in at Jess and Paul's flat to pick up some more plates, as well as a pumpkin pie.

Once back at the flat, we set the tables, which was no easy task, since the guest list was continually changing, up until 30 minutes before people were supposed to arrive. We had multiple cancellations and additions, but luckily it all worked out. We also finished the green bean hotdish. At this point we a) opened a bottle of champagne because the cooking was almost done and b) realized that there was no way that we could bake both the stuffing and the green bean hotdish before dinner. I made some quick calls, and we arranged for someone to stop by to pick up the stuffing on their way home, to bake it in their oven and then to bring it back!

Flat almost ready for dinner!

Our bar.

Stuffing sitting by the door (in the blue pot) waiting to be picked up.

Our last step was to make the French silk pie, which was quite simple. Then all we had to do was to put the finishing touches on the table. The turkey was done at this point, so we were able to start the baking of the green bean hotdish and make the gravy just before people started arriving. Such good timing! I even had time for a really quick phone call home.

Talking with Marie.

Opening the champagne.

Green bean hotdish!

Mr. Turkey.

I did it!

Georgie making the gravy.

Me and Jake- my favorite little man!

It was so much fun spending the day cooking and listing to (and singing along with) Christmas music with my flatmates. I knew that I was going to miss doing this with my mom and sisters, but Stef and Georgie were lovely!

People started arriving, bringing huge amounts of food with them. It was pretty incredible how quickly our flat filled up. It was a slightly chaotic, as people didn't having serving dishes or still needed oven time, etc., but we managed to get everything taken care of. As soon as the last person arrived, Paul and I started carving the turkeys, which were really so done that they were falling off the bones. I discovered the bag of giblets in my turkey, which I apparently missed when it was still frozen...

Paul and I carving turkies.

Finally, dinner was all set and we sat down at the table. I'm still so impressed that we managed to seat 25 people for a nice dinner. I gave a little introduction to Thanksgiving and encouraged everyone to think of what they were thankful for, but we didn't make everyone go around to say what they were thankful for. I sat at the head of the table, and it was so fun to look down the table and everyone having a good time together.

Our Thanksgiving table.

**Photo credit: Jon and Christy Remucal.



We were probably about half Americans and half not, and it was fun to see everyone embracing the holiday. We had a long, leisurely dinner, followed by a break for digesting and a little cleaning up. Dessert was round two, and everyone quite enjoyed the various pies. People stayed late chatting and helping us to clean up (which we were really thankful for!).

It truly was a perfect evening. Everyone had a lovely time, the company was fantastic and the food was amazing. (One of our Swiss colleagues even said that she thought she could get used to celebrating Thanksgiving, even if she didn't know any Americans...) I really feel blessed to have a little family here- my flatmates and people from work- who I can spend Thanksgiving with and whose company I truly enjoy. It was a magical evening, and I am very thankful. (Of course, it might have been such a success that now people are thinking that we should host big parties more often. But, hey, I'll take it!)

I was also able to Skype with my family the next day, and we got our traditional holiday family photos. Love!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Preparing for my first Swiss Thanksgiving.

Way back in September I realized that I would be spending my first Thanksgiving away from home. My friends Paul and Jess and I were commiserating about Thanksgiving, and we decided to organize a real Thanksgiving together and really do it up. Since my flat is quite large, we decided that my flatmates and I would host the Thanksgiving.

However, when we compiled our guest list, we realized that we had the possibility of almost 30 people attending Thanksgiving, which definitely complicates the logistics. The evites went out after Halloween, and we started planning for about 25 people to attend.

Our first consideration was how to make sure that all of the important Thanksgiving dishes were present. Since it is almost impossible to cook a full Thanksgiving meal for 25 in a small Swiss kitchen, we did a potluck, and had people sign up to bring the various parts of the meal. There was some concern for a while that no one was bringing green bean hotdish, which is an essential, so my flatmates and I decided to make it. A few reminder emails later, everyone was signed up for something and all of the major items were covered.

Check: Thanksgiving food.

Once we were sure that all of the important food items were covered, we had to figure out how we were going to seat everyone and with what people were going to eat and drink. From the start, I have been envisioning a huge sit-down meal with everyone at the same table and with real plates and silver and glasses, which made the logistics a little complicated. (But was totally worth it, I might add.) Luckily, we had enough tables, but we came up about 7 chairs short. So I poached some folding chairs from work that were being thrown out (not quite dumpster diving, but close...) and brought them home, and Paul and Jess agreed to bring over their plastic patio chairs.

Check: tables and chairs.

To make sure that we had enough plates, silverware and glasses, I made at least two trips to IKEA (and the bargain section at IKEA) to add to our supplies. Thank goodness for IKEA! I got some plates, silverware, water glasses and wine glasses, but still didn't have enough dinner plates. Since I didn't want to buy any more (who needs 25 dinner plates on a regular basis?), Paul and Jess agreed to bring over almost a whole set of plates, and our friend Rachel contributed a few dinner plates.

Check: plates and silverware.

With the general logistics out of the way, we began plotting the cooking logistics. As I have noted before, cooking here in Switzerland is just different from the US. I can't find things that I normally use and pans are different sizes than the US, so recipes have to be adjusted. Some of us have been practicing for Thanksgiving, making trial runs of the dishes that we were planning to bring to ensure that they turned out with all of the alterations that had to be made.

Take pecan pie, for example. For starters, I have no 9" pie plate, only a 13" tart pan, which means baking times are different. Also, corn syrup doesn't exist here, so I had to find a non-corn-syrup-containing recipe. I found a recipe that called for maple syrup instead, which I can find here. Third, there is no brown sugar here. So I had to have my flatmates Georgie import some brown sugar from England on one of here trips home. And, the funny thing is that pecans don't really grow here; they are all imported from the US (and really expensive!). Anyways, I baked a maple pecan pie in a tart pan, and discovered that pre-baking the crust may not be necessary in a deep-dish pie pan, but it is definitely necessary in a shallow tart pan. Somehow the crust migrated to a position between the filling and the pecans, which made for a interesting serving conundrum. I guess it was a good thing that I practiced, though, because I knew what to do when Thanksgiving actually came, after some frantic Google-ing of "how to blind bake a pie crust".

The turkey was another logistic problem, but practicing was definitely not an option. It might be possible to find whole turkeys in the normal supermarkets, but they are not always available. Even when you can find one in the supermarket, it is probably 4 or 5 kg maximum, which is not quite enough for 25 people. So, Paul made a special trip two weeks before Thanksgiving to the Coop with a fresh meat counter to reserve two of the largest turkeys possible. Turns out that the largest turkeys come is 6 kg (13.2 lbs), so we reserved two 6 kg turkeys and decided that Jess and I would each cook one. (Although, the ovens and pans are quite small here, so it's probably a good thing that they turkeys weren't much bigger.) Paul arranged to pick up the turkeys on Thanksgiving morning. We had no idea what exactly to expect as far as price, though, as the Coop didn't tell us the price until we picked them up. We just knew it would be expensive, as everything is here...

Besides a pecan pie and the turkey, my flatmates and I signed up to bring French silk pie (which required no practice or substitutions, thank goodness), as well as the green bean hotdish and stuffing, which both did required some strategerie to accomplish. When we make stuffing at home, my mom and I always use ready-made croutons for the stuffing, so I had to plan ahead to make sure that I had time to dry my own bread for the croutons. Thankfully that was pretty easy.

The green bean hotdish was slightly more complicated. Cream of mushroom soup in a can doesn't exist here, so I hunted down a recipe for homemade cream of mushroom soup. The onion topping is also not available here, so we searched for substitutes. Paul and Jess had found something similar at IKEA in the past, but IKEA has stopped carrying it. Luckily, my flatmate Stefanie was visiting her sister (who is currently studying in the US) just last week, so I ordered a bag of French's Fried Onions from amazon.com and had them shipped to Stef's sister, and Stef brought them back to Switzerland just in time for Thanksgiving!

Check: pecan pie, French silk pie, turkey, stuffing and green bean hotdish.

We had almost enough baking and cooking dishes to make everything, but we were one pie dish (or tart pan) short. So early this week I asked my Swiss colleague Rebekka if I could borrow a tart pan from her. I thought we had communicated quite well, so imagine my surprise when she shows up with a huge lidded pot in which you might cook pasta! I had been trying to ask for a round Kuchen (cake) pan, but she thought I wanted a Küche (kitchen) pan. Stupid umlauts! The funny thing is that my other Swiss colleague Michi had overheard the conversation in which I asked Rebekka to borrow the pan, and he said that he would've brought a big frying pan or wok! Heh. Thankfully, Paul and Jess also had an extra pie pan that I could borrow.

Check: baking dishes.

With that, everything was set for my first Swiss Thanksgiving!

Weekend in Thun.

I have been attending a small group off and on since I moved to Zürich last January, and this weekend we had a trip to Thun. One of the girls in the group has a family vacation home in the area, and we were quite happy to have the chance to use it.

We took the train down on Friday night. Aside from a delay due to a suicide on the train track (it wasn't our train, but probably the one before ours), we made it safely to Thun. Of course, this being a small town in Switzerland after 9 pm, there wasn't much open, and we wandered around the town looking for dinner, finally settling for McDonalds, which was really the only open option, since we weren't interested in a fancy restaurant. We played Apples to Apples until quite late, which was pretty funny.

On Saturday we slept in and had a lovely late brunch- pancakes, scrambled eggs, fruit salad and bacon. I am a huge fan of pancakes! From there, we decided to wander around Thun for the day. We walked along the river, listened to a enthusiastic bagpipe player, window shopped, enjoyed a coffee in a little cafe, and visited a castle down by the lake (although we weren't able to go inside due to a wedding). The town was really cute, and the weather was beautiful- sunny and crisp. It's been really foggy in Zürich recently, so I was really happy to finally see the sun. It's still a shock to me every time I catch a glimpse of the mountains- with the fog, it's easy to forget that they're there. I'm so thankful to live in a place where the mountains are so close and great views are everywhere!

Castle 1.

Castle 2.

You can see the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau from Thun.

We had a fondue dinner on Saturday night and enjoyed watching some Christmas movies, including White Christmas, one of my all-time favorites. We also took a late-night stroll through Thun, enjoying the Christmas lights and the atmosphere of the town at night, with the quiet streets and lights reflecting on the calm river.

On Sunday we got up a little earlier for breakfast and cleaning, as all of us needed to get back to Zürich. I left before most people, as I really needed to get back to start preparing for Thanksgiving this week. I'm hosting about 25 people at my little Zürich flat on Thursday evening and have a full week of work, so I definitely needed the time on Sunday afternoon to pull myself together.

Overall, it was a lovely weekend with great company!