Tour de French Supermarkets

Today continued the Great Cranberry Hunt of 2010. As we begin to plan our Thanksgiving repas, we're realizing that the ingredients we take for granted in the US and Canada are not so bountiful here in France.

Who would have thought this would be SO hard to accomplish?!

Turkey: Dinde in France is a Christmas thing, so we're obviously way too early for grocery stores to be stocking them. Luckily a teacher at my school offered me the name and number of a turkey farmer he knows. While I know this is going to be a very different experience from picking out a frozen turkey at Pick N Save, I think it might be our only option unless we want to have weird turkey filets at Thanksgiving dinner. Fortunately Jen has cooked a turkey before, so at least we won't be experimenting with technique!

Sweet potatoes: The ones I've seen at the grocery store are shriveled and pathetic-looking. Luckily, we found out the Asian market carries plump, beautiful patates douces, however they are not orange like in the US. They're the same beige-y white of regular potatoes! Weird. But at least they'll taste the same. No discussion yet of whether there will be marshmallows on top.

Brown sugar: Yeah right. Impossible to find. They have cane sugar, but it's not soft and I'm wondering how it'll affect the apple pie...

Canned pumpkin: I'm actually afraid we won't be able to have pumpkin pie, because no one seems to know where to get this. I talked about Thanksgiving in one of my classes today, and they couldn't even believe that we eat pumpkin at all, much less that it is part of a dessert.

Cranberries: I went to 4 different grocery stores today, searching for this elusive fruit. My teacher suggested I look at the frozen food store, but when I asked the woman there, her answer was very blunt: "We don't have those." I ended up buying some frozen airelles, which I thought were currants but which wordreference.com translates as "bilberries." I'm going to cook some up and see what happens... At E. LeClerc, I asked in the produce section and the woman said, "Cranberries, what are those?" and then suggested I look in the dietary needs section. At the organic/natural foods store, the man responded by saying, "Oh, those come from the US" and I said, "Yes, I know. I'm American and I need them for Thanksgiving, which is next week." He replied, "Hmm, Thanksgiving....do you mean Christmas?" He proceeded to lead me to the vitamin section, while asking if I had urinary tract issues. It's possible to find cranberry juice and dried cranberries...may end up concocting something out of those ingredients...

As hard as we're trying to create an authentic North American Thanksgiving, I'm beginning to wonder if it might be impossible!!