Cranberry, where for art thou Cranberry?

You never know what you're going to miss. I was missing home a bit so I decided to make Thanksgiving dinner. And of course, you need cranberries to complete the plate, right? Just for color?

Cranberries are so ubiquitous in Michigan this time of year with stacks of fresh berries in all the markets, pyramids of cans of cranberry sauce in the aisles, umpteen types of gourmet cranberry sauce in the fancy foods stores and catalogs.

Well...cranberries are NOT big in Australia.
We're coming up on Christmas, I thought perhaps there might be some in the organic markets or in the bigger chain stores, but no.

This is all I found. Turns out the canned sauce has wheat in it (yeah, I don't know why they need to put wheat in there either...) and the snack pack of cranberries was presweetened (even though it said it wasn't. I used them in an orange/cranberry sauce that was a shade of the real thing.



and how about Turkey? Also NOT a big seller in Australia. Best I found in one store was a couple huge turkey legs. Anyone who has eaten enough turkeys over the holidays know that those legs are not going to be very tender...Ah well. (After purchasing these in Woolworths, I wandered down to the IGA to check for another ingredient I was missing, they had cute little 8lb frozen turkeys. Next time.

Pumpkin pie. No luck there either. Although the squash they call pumpkin would probably work well in a pie, it's a bit stringy, so I made a butternut pie instead. Darrell can't really tell the difference, but those of you who make pie know that there is! I'll see if I can find some pie pumpkin seeds and get them started for pie in fall...about April.

Here's Darrell with his first pseudo-Thanksgiving dinner. Turkey leg, stuffing, grandma's sweet potatoes, and veggies.




And here's the pie