Guatemalan Thanksgiving

What better way to celebrate Thanksgiving than with the friend I met in a cooking class, and while we're at it, let's invite the chef! Nidia's husband's family was coming from Miami to visit Guatemala for Thanksgiving weekend, so in the spirit of impressing all our guests with culinary skills and cultural diversity, we decided to make a traditional Thanksgiving meal with a Guatemalan twist!

We made a turkey with stuffing of jalapeno cornbread, sausages and fresh herbs from the local market. We also made tamales with chipilin (a green leafy vegetable somewhere between parsley and spinach), mashed malanga (a large root vegetable that is similar to potato but has white flesh covered with tiny pink spots and has a sweet, much richer flavor than potatoes; malanga is exclusively found in the Carribean). For dessert, I made an apple and pumpkin pie, and Nidia made flan de zapote. Zapote is a fruit in Guatemala that looks like kiwi on the outside, papaya on the inside and tastes like brown sugar. Since pumpkins are not sold here, I looked in every grocery store I know of for canned pumpkin to make the pies. The last store I visited, Puerta del Sol (an small store specializing in US imports) had a small stack of canned cranberry sauce, and pumpkin. I bought the last 2 cans...for $4 each. But it was worth it!

All in all, the dinner was a huge success, and leftovers didn't last long!

We enjoyed the sunset from the balcony before dinner

Filling for my apple pie! Yummmm