Alas, we could not fly home for Thanksgiving, so we decided to drive down to Switzerland with friends from work (Andrea, Tim, Joe, Jim, Theresa, Gaby, and Irma). In this picture you can kind of see our chalet in the upper left corner. The connection to the Chalet is that when Andrea and Tim worked in Geneva last year, Tim's boss had a chalet that he let friends stay over the weekends - it reminded me a lot of the cabin in Owen County, quite frankly. The place was pretty huge - the only problem was that it had some low ceilings and beams - so my head is banged up a bit.Probably the biggest memory of the weekend was lugging all our crap up the hill. We were told that if it had snowed, then it would be diffuclt to drive the car up the "hill". Of course it snowed, and we had a 20 minute hike up - probably didn't help that our tires had about as much tread as a figure skate. Needless to say, we made three trips in one night - including one especially memorable one with a 75 pound piece of luggage (they really don't roll in a foot snow that well). I told Tim (Andrea's husband) that we probably broke every rule of hiking that I learned in Boy Scouts.
The food was great. Although we had two turkeys, we cooked the first one and had meat left over (we cooked the other one later in the day). We also had a corn souffle; brie/spinach/artichoke dressing; regular dressing; a fruit cranberry compote; a 'unknown' french squash soup, mashed potatoes, gravy - the usual American meal, but difficult than usual to get the ingredients.For dessert Tim and Andrea made a pumpkin pie (one of the better ones I've had), and Gaby and Irma made a flan. We also got a recipe from Joe's mother for a banana creme pie (which Joe probably had 80% of it).
Not sure if I remember all the alcohol we had - had a nice magnum of Cremant from Alsace, several whites and reds, and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
It was a totally different Thanksgiving than I've had in the past, and I think it probably helped that we worked on Thursday, and didn't have our dinner until Saturday.
The other thing we realized is that we're really excited about our ski weekend before Xmas (which is going to be about an hour south of where we were, but in France. We went with the catered option so we don't have to worry about food - and after planning, transporting, cooking, and cleaning up for basically one meal - we're glad we put up the little extra.
