the French Farm

This is the French Farm - a farm owned and established by...wait for it...a French guy. He raises all sorts of fowl and pigs and produce for hotels and ex-pats in the Gurgaon area. We had heard about him long ago but never tried to find out more. When I wanted a turkey for Thanksgiving, tho, we decided to check it out. Randy and I and Christelle and her kids went out there, to the sticks. Our kids didn't want to come, but they should have, it was fun! He had chicks that he let the kids hold, and baby pigs, and HUGE pigs too. It's all free-range and organic, and they went to some trouble to explain how they feed and clean up and all that. The only thing I care about organic is that is costs more!

Looking in at all the critters.

He has geese, turkeys, chickens, Japanese quail, ducks. Turkeys are UGLY! we didn't really pick the one we wanted, we just told him how big of a turkey we wanted. Most of the biggest ones were spoken for already, so we ordered 2 that were about 4 kg each. Total cost, 3400 rupees, about $75 USD. ouch. But hey, it's organic right?

Thanksgiving. sort of.

Last year we didn't do anything for Thanksgiving, since the kids had school and Randy worked, and I'm Canadian :)

This year, we were asked to host some of the missionaries for dinner. I had two turkeys delivered from the French Farm (see the blog entry about that) and set about figuring out how to cook a non-pop-up-button equipped turkey in a toaster oven. Luckily Mom came up with the brilliant idea to cook one the night before, and good thing, because the heat was too low and it was in for 5 hours!! At 1am I took it out, and hang the consequences! It was cooked, a bit too much, but edible. The next day I cooked the other one, and it turned out perfect (higher heat, more basting, etc). Like a ding-dong (or perhaps a frazzled cook) I didn't take any photos of the food, but we ate good - potatoes, gravy, peas and carrots, rolls, stuffing and apple crisp for dessert. We had two sets of missionaries, from our branch, with one American and one Indian in each companionship. Not any American Indians, altho that would have been appropriate!

We made them hold the sign. It is all part of singing for your supper here at the Leavitt house. From the left is Elder Chilumula, Elder Hawks, Elder Carmen, and Elder Adari.

After dinner, Alex thought we should all make toilet paper tube pilgrims and Indians (the native amer. kind) (we did this once several years ago with Clancy's and it was very fun) but she forgot to figure out instructions, and we didn't have black paper. Hard to make a pilgrim without black!! So while we all hemmed and hawed about what to do, Elder Carmen decided to make Santa Claus and then we were all off. I totally copied him. But I had cooked, so it was ok.

Here is the first batch.... notice the one Native American that came to our feast - he is Randy's minimum participation person. He started out as only a face, but decency (and I) demanded a loincloth.

Batch two showed some real creativity, and some randomness as well :) Elder Chilumula's is pretty wild - not even HE knew what it was!! And Elder Hawks' pope/disco king was a highlight too. I hope the Elders had fun, we all did.

And the unpleasant aftermath. I think every dish we own and several of the Taylor's pots and dishes were dirty! Good thing the new maid does the dishes!!