Colourful Vegetable Medley

This is one of those recipes that the photograph doesn’t do justice to. In reality the colours are much brighter, and it makes an excellent side dish with just about any meat. This colourful and fresh dish is also very economical. Plus, it is a fantastic way to use up your more raggedy Thanksgiving leftovers - just stir chunks of cooked turkey and/or ham through it when you add the peas and gently heat through before serving as a one dish meal with hot rolls. Easy and delicious.

To serve four people as a main dish and six to eight as a side, you need:

2 tablespoons oil (I used olive, but any oil is fine)

1 red onion

1 tablespoon sugar

1 small cabbage, shredded

¼ cup Madeira or sherry

¼ cup chicken or vegetable stock

1 tbsp soy sauce

½ cup frozen peas


Heat the oil in a frying pan (with a lid) and sauté the red onion over low heat until it is just beginning to soften. Add the sugar and stir to mix through. 

Turn up the heat to medium and add the shredded cabbage. Stir-fry for a few minutes, just until the cabbage is tender-crisp.  Add the Madeira or sherry and the chicken stock, along with the soy sauce.  Stir to mix and bring to the boil. Allow to bubble away for a minute or so just to let the liquid reduce a bit.  Stir in the frozen peas.  Then put the lid on the frying pan, lower the heat and cook for about three minutes.  You still want the peas to be nice, bright green.

The Thanksgiving Tradition

It is Thanksgiving in the United States on Thursday. I think having a set day every year to join together in being grateful for all our blessings and to spend time with our families is a wonderful tradition. I come from Canada and we have Thanksgiving there too, only it is celebrated a bit earlier, on the second Monday in October. No matter what is happening in our lives, we all still have things to be grateful for, and it is good to take time out to do that. Even though I have lived in England for over twenty years now, I still make a point of celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving with my family. It is not a holiday here, but we still have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, even if it is on a workday! It does not just give my family and I an opportunity to be grateful, it also enables me to celebrate my heritage and instil this tradition in our son, who is, after all, a dual citizen just like me.

For Americans Thanksgiving is said to have begun back in 1621, with a meal shared between the Plymouth Colonists and the Wampanoag Indians. Since 1863 it has been a tradition to repeat this celebration on the fourth Thursday in November with family gatherings, traditional meals and parades. The Macy’s Parade in New York City may be the most famous, but parades are held in many American cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, Plymouth, Seattle, Pittsburg and Los Angeles. For Canadians, Thanksgiving stemmed from the historic European tradition of a day of thanksgiving for the harvest and also from a thanksgiving celebration held by Martin Frobisher, a British explorer, on his arrival in Newfoundland in the late 1570’s.

The Canadian Thanksgiving is a much lower-key celebration than in the United States, but just because the celebrations are lower key does not mean Canadians don’t feel Thanksgiving is an important part of their lives and heritage. In fact it is often the holiday tradition those who leave Canada miss the most.

In England where I live, the only harvest-time Thanksgiving celebration I know of is that held by the Christian church on the Sunday in September or October consisting of a thanksgiving service during which a collection of food is made for the poor. Sometimes there is a church lunch afterwards, or a harvest supper. It is lovely, but the trouble is, anyone who does not attend church misses out on the opportunity to celebrate their blessings and be thankful. As a result, there is no one corporate reminder here in the UK for secular society of the very important premise of gratitude and how it should figure prominently in our lives.

However, in the case of both the American and Canadian celebrations, Thanksgiving has become much more secular over the years. Although I’m not a tremendous fan of religious celebrations being assimilated into popular culture (and sometimes losing some meaning in the process), in this case I think it is a good thing. You see, the majority of people in North America celebrate Thanksgiving regardless of their faith. Most of us have a lot to be thankful for whatever our circumstances and whatever your faith, being grateful is a positive emotion. It benefits not just the person who is grateful, but also those around them.

When I was a little girl in school, they always used to ask us what we were grateful for at Thanksgiving. It made us stop and think. It is so easy to rush through our lives, getting caught up in the corporate quest for “more” and forgetting that, in most cases, we already have so much. It is not just children who need to be reminded.

Whether you are in a country that celebrates Thanksgiving or not, if you were to celebrate it on Thursday, what would you be grateful for? In other words, what are you grateful for right now? My family, my home and the abundance in our lives are only just a start on my list. And if you are celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday, do enjoy it. It is entirely possible that Great Aunt Martha might drink too much and Uncle Bill will probably say something controversial as usual, but does it really matter? And if the turkey isn’t perfect or someone forgets the green bean casserole, never mind. What you eat isn’t important, eating it with a grateful heart is. It is a privilege to celebrate Thanksgiving - so please do have a happy one!

A Canadian Thanksgiving in England

It’s Thanksgiving Monday in Canada today, and nearly everyone will be celebrating with a big turkey dinner. When I was a kid growing up in Canada, I loved Thanksgiving. I have many fond memories of Thanksgiving with my family, and they are especially poignant for me now as my parents passed away less than two years ago.

I’ve always tried to keep Thanksgiving in England, although I must admit it is challenging. First of all, whole fresh turkeys are non-existent here in October. Even my wonderful butcher can’t get one for me. He did say he could get me a sort of turkey roll thing, made up of the best bits of more than one turkey, but I really didn’t fancy that at all. Apparently the turkeys are not very good at the moment as they are all being fed up for Christmas. If you get them too early they are kind of stringy. Good news for the turkeys I suppose, but not for me. Of course, that was after he suggested I might be mixed up, as wasn’t Thanksgiving in November?

That happens a lot over here. Many of people seem to think that Canada and the US are pretty much the same country and have exactly the same holidays – something that upsets both Canadians and Americans alike. Don’t get us wrong, we like each other well enough, but it would be kind of like suggesting to an Englishman that he was Scottish or Irish. It’s not true and it kinds of winds us up.

So after explaining that Canadians and Americans do actually celebrate Thanksgiving during different months, I did what I do every year and ordered the biggest chicken they could get for me. I will refer to this chicken as the “turkey” and for just this one day my family will indulge my delusion. After all, it will taste fairly similar to a turkey, and be served with the usual Thanksgiving fodder – mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy, stuffing and vegetables. I’ve even found some canned pumpkin to make some pumpkin pie. You can get it in the odd supermarket over here, usually ones in areas that have a high population of ex-pats.

Most British people don’t understand pumpkin pie, and I admit, it is an acquired taste. I also, possibly controversially, firmly believe that pumpkin pie is best made from canned pumpkin and not by hollowing out a fresh pumpkin. I remember one British friend who went to an awful lot of trouble to get pumpkin pie one year when we were going to his house for dinner in October. I was incredibly touched by the gesture and very grateful. The only thing was, the bakery that had made the pie had used a fresh pumpkin to make it. For some reason, pumpkin pie made from fresh pumpkin just does not taste like pumpkin pie to me. You see, we had some amazing cooks in our family, and all of them - to a woman - agreed that canned pumpkin was the only way to go. So pumpkin pie made with fresh pumpkin tastes very strange to me. Certainly it is probably the more evolved culinary choice, but I remember I struggled to eat the pie my friend had bought. It seemed so savoury to me, and was spiced very strangely. However, I will always be touched by his thoughtfulness, and of course I never said a word.

In my family, pumpkin pie was always served with whipped cream – and we kids thought it was the best treat if we were allowed to squirt the cream from an aerosol container. One year, the person who cooked the family Thanksgiving dinner whipped actual whipping cream as a special treat. We kids were heathen enough to be disappointed! Thankfully I can get aerosol cream here, and I will use it today in memory of our childish lack of any culinary pretension whatsoever – although I must confess that I would never serve it to guests, and my own tastes have evolved so much as to make me admit (although the kid in me is loathe to) that freshly whipped cream does taste better and have a better texture. I know some people do prefer Cool Whip non-dairy whipped topping with their pumpkin pie, but I definitely cannot get that here and a whipping cream versus aerosol cream versus Cool Whip debate is not something I want to be responsible for starting. That could be very dangerous indeed.

I must admit, it is easier to celebrate Thanksgiving now than it was when I first arrived in England twenty years ago. Although they are not widely available you can get most of the familiar North American brands if you look hard enough. There’s Stove Top stuffing (admittedly at an extortionate price, but hey, it’s only once a year), Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce, and as I said before, canned pumpkin. Heck, I even found Pillsbury Crescent Rolls in the supermarket chiller cabinet the other day – not that they are anything to do with Thanksgiving, but I’m pleased that more and more of my favourites are starting to cross the pond.

Of course, now that I have lived pretty much half my life in England, most of my cultural identity is British. I was naturalised nearly fifteen years ago, and I no longer even possess a Canadian passport, although I am entitled to one if I ask nicely. My husband and son are British (although my son does officially have dual nationality) and it was easier, and indeed something I desired, to allow myself to be assimilated. Dual nationality isn’t something I think about much, and for convenience I prefer to refer to myself as British. However I have never forgotten where I come from. It is a place I am proud to say I grew up in - and on this one Monday in October – well, my name is April, and I’m a Canadian.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

An Ex-Pat Thanksgiving

I’m sure most everyone in the United States is already getting excited about Thanksgiving. It’s not long now till the fourth Thursday in November. Growing up in Canada, I always thought that Americans had it right when it came to celebrating Thanksgiving. Although the holiday weekend was a big deal in Canada, we only got one day off school, not two. We did have big family dinners, but it seemed to me that the ones in America looked much more exciting. We had parades as well, but who could compete with the spectacular balloons of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in New York?

So I never felt that passionately about Canadian Thanksgiving. As the Canadian ancestors in my family tree travelled to America on the Mayflower (but later fled to Canada as United Empire Loyalists), I liked the pilgrim story. It was much more interesting than dusty old explorers Martin Frobisher and Samuel de Champlain celebrating with the Indians. This opinion made me very unpopular with patriotic teachers in primary school. I did love the family get-togethers and Thanksgiving food, and of course, I was grateful for all the blessings I had, but it wasn’t until I left Canada in 1989, that I suddenly realised how much I loved Thanksgiving.

I came to this realisation because Thanksgiving just didn’t seem to exist here in England. The first year I lived here, the second Monday in October came and went, and no mention was made of Thanksgiving. As my fiancées family had lived in the United States for several years I nurtured the faint hope that they might celebrate Thanksgiving in November, but that didn’t materialise either. I never said anything, because I was at the point in my life where I didn’t want to stand out. I was the new kid on the block – okay I was the immigrant – and hated to mention anything that made me seem any more foreign than I already felt.

But as a married woman two years later, I decided that we would celebrate Thanksgiving, and we would celebrate it the second Monday in October just as my family always had. Unfortunately I had no idea just how difficult that was going to be.

My first stop was, of course, the grocery store. Finding the usual Thanksgiving ingredients seemed like it would be fairly easy in Autumnal England. Potatoes were readily available, and vegetables of every description lined the shelves of the produce department. It was not until I got to the meat department that my problems began. I looked everywhere for a turkey but there was none to be found. I went to the butcher counter to ask the man himself. After I made my request, the butcher looked at me as though I had asked for something very exotic, like maybe ostrich or boar.

“Turkeys?” he asked.

“Yes, please, “ I replied.

“You won’t find fresh turkeys this time of year, only at Christmas. You might find a frozen one though”. He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.

Three grocery stores later and I was still in the same boat. No one had fresh turkey and the frozen ones were clearly left over from Christmas 1985 (this was 1991), totally frosted up and unappetising. There wasn’t a Butterball to be found. You should have seen the butcher’s face in the store where I asked for those! “Butter’s in the dairy section,” was only the beginning.

In the end all I had for my first Thanksgiving dinner in England was some potatoes, vegetables and some very dodgy looking packaged stuffing. Not only that, but my request for cranberry sauce had been met with utter confusion. Ocean Spray wouldn’t make it over here for several years after that.

So in the end I cooked a chicken. The stuffing tasted rather strange to me and without the cranberry sauce, well, as far as I was concerned, it could have been any old Sunday lunch. There was not even any pumpkin pie. It was very disappointing.

Over the years I coped by either arranging to be in Canada for Thanksgiving or by smuggling jars of cranberry sauce and packages of Stove Top stuffing back in my luggage after our Canadian summer vacations. But if it was Thanksgiving in England, it was always chicken.

The past five or six years have been so chaotic for us I hardly even thought about making Thanksgiving dinner, except the times we were in Canada with my Dad and Mom. But their deaths eleven and ten months ago respectively suddenly made me crave the Thanksgiving tradition again. It was important to me to celebrate not only Thanksgiving itself, but also the happy memories I have of them at Thanksgiving.

This year, cooking Thanksgiving dinner was a little different. I still had to cook chicken, but the rest of the ingredients were much easier. I managed to find a supplier of Stove Top stuffing here in England. Okay, it makes my hair curl paying the equivalent seven dollars for something I could have bought for $1.99 in Canada, but for a treat, it’s worth it. And I found proper Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce here too. We finally got Ocean Spray products about seven years ago, but this year I even found the sauce with whole berries like I used to buy in Canada – oh joy! And my son helped me make the dinner. While he peeled parsnips I shared my secrets for a homemade Butterball. If you buy a big chicken, lift the skin up off the breast and slide a few pieces of butter in underneath you get an effect not unlike a Butterball turkey. I also showed him how to make a pumpkin pie using Libby’s Tinned Pumpkin – in my opinion, the only way to go. But that’s another column.

And when we sat down to steaming plates heaving with juicy chicken (which I insisted on referring to as turkey), stuffing, mashed potatoes, roast parsnips, leeks and gravy it was with glad and thankful hearts. We rejoiced in our blessings, toasted absent friends and family, talked about happy memories and celebrated Thanksgiving as never before.

So spare a thought for friends and family abroad when you next celebrate Thanksgiving. Remember that sometimes it isn’t easy to keep to traditions and think how much you’d miss them if you couldn’t. It even makes listening to the same old stories for the seven hundredth time or keeping Great Aunt Mildred out of the sherry seem like fun. Wherever and whenever you celebrate, I wish you many blessings, and a very Happy Thanksgiving