Thanksgiving and Christmas in Orléans

I've missed much of November and December, so this post will be on our two 'American' holidays - Thanksgiving and Christmas. On both holidays, we invited guests over to our apartment and cooked American-style turkeys. The turkeys we ordered from a shop in Orléans. The tukeys here are all excellent, but have much less fat and are smaller than the american birds. They cook differently, with little 'drippings' for gravy. The meat is very tasty, however. In fact, we've noticed that all the poultry sold here is of high quality and generally more expensive than poultry we typically buy at US stores. I assume the birds here are either free range ('plein air')

The image above is of our family and the St. Vincent's, our French friends (Nicolas, daughter Pauline and Caroline). Nicolas works for the American company John Deere and Caroline was an English teacher, so they speak English very well.

Christmas was a similar get-together, this time with our Algerian-French friends, El-Hadi (Laifa) and Latifa Boufendi (below). We were happy that our oldest son Steve, in his third year at UC Santa Cruz, was with us. Steve spent some time with friends in Amsterdam and then joined us in Orléans. I work with El-Hadi at the Université d'Orléans. El-Hadi brought some excellent Champagne and fois gras with onion sauce and bread, and I bought a couple of dozen fresh oysters ('huitres'). All were very successful. The oysters are very much a French Christmas tradition. I saw a report on the France 2 tv news that quoted an oyster producer to say that something like 60% of their sales were on 2 days near Christmas!

We also had a turkey for Christmas, and this time it was more expensive - I guess because turkeys are also traditional Christmas fare in France. The 5.7 (12.5 lb) kg turkey cost 114 euros! Hmmm....oh well, it was only once. The Thanksgiving turkey was smaller but not that much smaller and it was on the order of 50 euros.