Thanksgiving Feast

Thanksgiving is a wonderful festival here in US. We don't celebrate thanksgiving in India. Of course, we have pongal, the harvest festival. But we all love the long weekend breaks and the sale in various shops, shopping, etc,. In my girls' school, they had a thanksgiving feast on monday. Every year, they used to have this feast for parents and usually the school buy half of the food and the other half, parents bring it. They can make on their own or they can buy from shops and bring it. Its their choice. This year it was pretty different and really encouraging for the parents who like to use their artistic ideas.

They have 4 class rooms in their school. This is 3 year old school opened by an Indian lady. This year, the name of the feast was "All Around the World". Each class room was assigned a country and we have to make dishes from that country and we have to arrange the table so that it goes along with the country's tradition and culture. Winning classroom will be awarded. Italy - this was my girls' classroom theme and they have 8 kids in their classroom and out of which 2 of them were from Italy (grand parents from Italy). I had never made any Italian recipes before and I did not want to mess up the competition. So I told all my other (parent) friends that I will buy Pizza.

Since we are all recovering from the cold, cough and flu, I didn't want to strain myself cooking some new dish for 20 people. One of the kid's grandmother was here and she made all the traditional Italian recipes like Pesto, Walnut-Dates cookies, Almond cookies, and one more chocolate cookie (which I forgot the name) and everything were really yummy. Other parent brought appetizer, me - pizza, other parent got Sphagetti with meatballs. One of the parent wanted to make the Gondola for the table. She really worked hard to make it. she got help from her husband making the side part of the boat, which she attached to the regular table and me and her mom helped her to cover the table with black table cloth, and used the newspapers as water and we covered it with blue table cloth and made it as a boat floating in water.

We used the plain red, white and green table cloth (from dollar shop) for the Italian flag which we hang behind the table, and we asked our kids' class teacher to take print outs of famous cities in Italy, famous personaities from Italy and we pasted it in the flag. Also, we made a small table for the stuff for which the origin is from Italy, like grapes, Zuchini, salami, spaghetti, pasta, ricotta cheese etc., which inspired the judges too. Finally, we won the first prize.

Because of the traditional recipes from Italy and the wonderful Gondola tablescape, we won this All around the world Contest. This was really encouraging and an opportunity for the parents to get to know each other and work as a group. Frankly speaking, I have never met few parents before. But this gave me an opportunity to meet them all and talk to them. Most of all my hubby dear came to the contest and he had taken a day off on monday, because it happened to be our 6th Wedding Anniversary!