With Thanksgiving next Thursday will the team be doing anything to mark that very special day when the natives decided not to kill the English invaders? As an American I will be busy doing the turkey, stuffing, cranbery sauce, candied sweet potatoes, salads, and pumpkin pie. Of course being recently dx as a diabetic this year will prove to be a challenge.
Carol

This is why we don't allow Americans on this website - Honestly, you can't go round "Doing the Turkey" It's illegal over here, and probably in Amsterdam as well !!!!

Saying that, knowing Amsterdam ????

Keep taking the tablets for goodness sake Nick and go and lie down in a darkened room...

Carol - I think GFL will be coming live from the BBC Good Food Show at the NEC next week (well, they certainly have done the past few years), so they may do a Thanksgiving special, but if they do it won't be from the studio! I am sure that GFL will let us know what they are up to soon... hopefully?

Carol - I hope they do a show on Thanksgiving, I've always wanted to try pumpkin pie so I'd love to watch it being made. I'm also curious about the candied sweet potatoes, love to see that, too. Here's hoping we see some of the dishes you mentioned on next weeks show!

Nick, just how well do you know Amsterdam? not as well as me I think being a born and bred Amsterdametje. As for thanksgiving, they should keep that in America together with Halloween which is just a poor excuse for begging , we Europeans have plenty of our own holidays to celebrate. Each to his own.

Sorry - Bad Joke - I have been twice and I absoultely love the place especially the Leidesplein area. Sorry no offence meant

Cheers

Nick

You are forgiven

lol Nick, thanks for the laugh. After being here for 27 years you would think that I would speak like the natives.

Alysha, pumpkin pie is very easy to do. They sell pumpkin puree in tins. All you have to do is add a couple of spices evaporated milk, an egg, sugar, then pour it into a pie case, bung it in the oven and Bob's your uncle. I cheat and get the already made cases from Tesco, the filling is enough for 2 shallow pies.

Marieke, following the history of Thanksgiving, they were English fleeing from the oppressive government of the day for religious freedom. I agree though with keeping Halloween in the states.

Candied sweet potatoes: parboil the peeled sweet potatoes. Cut them into slices and layer a casserole dish. Sprinkle brown sugar and add a few dabs of butter, then layer again the potatoes and then the sugar/butter until you use all the ingredients up. Now, if you're really into Americanisms, you then cover the top with marshmellows and then bake until the marshmellows are a light brown. Oh yum.

Halloween isn't American. We've been celebrating All Hallows eve up here for ever. Children go out "Guising" most often dressed as ghosts or witches and in return for performing a song are given fruit and sweets. Non of the trick or treat nonsense. Think its pagan and has to do with warding off ghosts.

Halloween is All Hallow's Eve It is the evening before November !st - All Saints Day. Hallow's being the saints. The Eve of All Saints, it goes back to the early days of the Christian Church. "2nd November being The Feast of All Souls, hence the evening before All Hallows aka All Saints is the day that ghosts, witches etc go ahaunting, nothing whatsoever do do with paganism. as far as I am aware, I'll look into it. However, the trick and treating did come from America. I will never know why this was taken on board.

I have looked into it and I apologise for being pedantic but...Halloween is All-Hallows'-Eve which is the night-before-All-Saints'-Day. Some tell me they understand that Halloween pranks were a post-Reformation contribution to plague Catholics who kept the vigil of All Saints. Now it is possible that Halloween was abused for such a purpose; nevertheless, during all the Christian centuries up until the simplification of the Church calendar in 1956, it was a liturgical vigil in its own right and thus has a reason for being...A celebration much like our Halloween, with bonfires and feasting on apples and nuts and harvest fruits, was part of pagan worship for centuries. The Britons celebrated in honor of their sun-god with bonfires, a tribute to the light that brought them abundant harvest. At the same time they saluted Samhain, their "lord of death," who was thought to gather together at last the souls of the year's dead which had been consigned to the bodies of animals in punishment for their sins. The Romans celebrated the same kind of festival at this time in honor of their goddess Pomona, a patroness of fruits and gardens. Whether the Church "baptized" these customs or chose this season for her feasts of the dead independent of them, their coincidence shows again how alike men are when they seek God and His ways, give praise, use the language of symbols to express the inexpressible.

It was in the eighth century that the Church appointed a special date for the feast of All Saints, followed by a day in honor of her soon-to-be saints, the feast of All Souls. She chose this time of year, it is supposed, because in her part of the world it was the time of barrenness on the earth. The harvest was in, the summer done, the world brown and drab and mindful of death. Snow had not yet descended to comfort and hide the bony trees or blackened fields; so with little effort man could look about and see a meditation on death and life hereafter...It was in Ireland and Scotland and England that All Hallows' Eve became a combination of prayer and merriment. Following the break with the Holy See, Queen Elizabeth forbade all observances connected with All Souls' Day. In spite of her laws, however, customs survived; even Shakespeare in his Two Gentlemen of Verona has Speed tell Valentine that he knows he is in love because he has learned to speak "puling like a beggar at Hallowmas." This line must have escaped the Queen.


Tricks or Treats — Old Style
Begging at the door grew from an ancient English custom of knocking at doors to beg for a "soul cake" in return for which the beggars promised to pray for the dead of the household. Soul cakes, a form of shortbread — and sometimes quite fancy, with currants for eyes — became more important for the beggars than prayers for the dead, it is said. Florence Berger tells in her Cooking for Christ a legend of a zealous cook who vowed she would invent soul cakes to remind them of eternity at every bite. So she cut a hole in the middle and dropped it in hot fat, and lo — a doughnut. Circle that it is, it suggests the never-ending of eternity. Truth or legend, it serves a good purpose at Halloween.

Sorry, I suppose I can't give up the teaching bug, please forgive me and not abuse me

I googled and got this off the web, I already knew though, honest