Thanksgiving weekend

 Thanksgiving weekend started of course on Thursday.  I bought a chicken, because I did not want to spend $30 on a turkey.  I made mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli, green beans (but not the casserole), and a salad.  I could only find crayons and couldn't find a recipe to make them into relish., the meal was lacking some of the standards, but with a little wine, it very good.  We finished it off with sweet potato pie.  A good celebration.

 Then all day Friday and Saturday morning Yuko, my room mate took over the kitchen.  She was preparing everything we would need for a feast on Saturday.  One of her students had invited us to her summer home, a few kilometers outside the city for a sushi meal.  When I walked into the house, I was overwhelmed.  It reminded me of Lithuanian, an A-framed wooden structure with a roaring fire in a beautiful fire place.

 Alexandra's father got us all set up, bringing in the traditional Macedonian baking table for the cooks to work at.  The first job was to roll out the Japanese noodles.  The recipe is actually the same as german of American homemade noodles, but they would be cooked in a Japanese broth and we were going to eat them with sushi, so they were Japanese.  Yuko had brought a rolling pin, but the table came with a broom stick sort of thing.  It is a little difficult to see, but the Macedonian method it to roll the dough around the stick and then roll the entire thing as one might a rolling pin.  It is then unrolled and turned 90 degrees, so the end product is round.  It was very interesting to see.

 The next job was the sushi. The bottom layer is seaweed topped with rice, sticky Japanese rice.  Macedonia raises rice not far from here, but it is far less glutenous.  The individual kernels are separate when it is cooked.  Anyway, after the rice, the sushi haas fish and egg.  They were then rolled and cut.





                                                       And then they were ready to eat

 And eat we did.  I was surprised at how filling sushi was, but then again it does have a lot of rice in it.  So we ate sushi, salad,  cooked vegetables and chicken and then the noodles, washing it all down with some very excellent Macedonian red and white wine.  (Alexandra's father had gotten me some of the local beer, because he apparently had heard that Americans like to drink beer.  I much preferred the wine.)  We just about ready to bring out the desserts, when Alexandra said that we really needed to try something Macedonian.  She brought up a wonderful beans and homemade sausage dish.  It was very good, but I will need to try it again when that is the only main dish.  After that we had ice cream and red bean sauce, Macedonian rice pudding and baklava, all very good.


 We were then entertained with a fashion show.  Alexandra's grandmother had made this costume for her when she was in high school.  There is a linen underdress that only has a little embroidery on the hem.  Then comes the shorter long sleeve coat type garment that has slits up the side.  The embroidery on this piece is on the outside on the back and on the inside on the side panels.  These panels are then brought around and tucked into the belt as seen here, with the embroidery now on the outside.  Clever.

 

Then Yuko tried it on.  This is the winter garb.  It includes a short blouse that fills in where the quilted jacket vest  leaves space at the top.  I had seen this particular design at a dance concert last year and thought that it was for me.  It allows lots of space for wide hips.  The apron is heavy wool and worn all the time to keep the rest of the outfit clean.  Up to the 1950s women wore these outfits everyday.  Each village had it own costume, some differing only in the embroidery and others in the design.









So, after a long day I was relaxed.