An American Side Dish in Portugal
The challenges of building Thanksgiving in a foreign land
We’re still *burp* working off the gustatory excess from a muito saboroso Thanksgiving, and we assume you are too. How did your holiday go?
Here’s a bit about ours…
The Thanksgiving Table Treasure Hunt
Friendsgiving Dinner
Dancing Queens and Retro Scenes
Let’s get to the adulting!
The Thanksgiving Table Treasure Hunt
Grocery shopping is one of the most routine things in life. In Portland, we knew where we liked to go, and we could get whatever we wanted whenever we wanted, often all in one stop.
Moving to a new country with a new food supply chain has made this task anything but routine.
We kind of expected it. One of the main activities of our scouting trip in April was visiting all the grocery stores just to see if we could get most of the types and qualities of food we are used to.
We prefer to eat as organic, fresh, and local as possible. While we’re flexible on any of these categories to a certain extent, we’ve experienced some countries on our travels that have none of the three - everything in the stores is ultra-processed, chemical-laden and bad for you. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for us to figure out that there’s plenty of organic/fresh/local food here, and that helped us pull the trigger on the move.
While there are no Portuguese Whole Foods or New Seasons, we do have a variety of natural food stores at our disposal. They’re more like the old-school, crunchy natural food stores from the pre-Whole-Foods days. And there’s this weird health-food chain called Celeiro that only exists in malls, and the people who work there wear lab coats. It’s an odd setup but they do have good stuff.
Each of these little bio markets has a strength, but none of them has everything we’re looking for at any given time, and they all have pretty inconsistent stock.
The big normal stores like Continente are out on the fringe of the city and tend to be like a Fred Meyer/Kroger – multiple departments full of standard fare with a small “natural” section. There are compact versions of these stores near us in the city center that have staples, but definitely not one-stop shopping.
And then there’s El Corte Inglés, a huge Spanish department store with a gourmet supermercado in the basement. This is where we go for the things we just can’t find anywhere else… and we pay dearly for it.
Because we have no car, every time we need to go buy groceries, we go by foot, transit, or in extreme cases, Uber. So we have to consider how much we can carry between the two of us. And we have to be strategic about what we need to get where, because why carry a heavy carton of oat milk 25 minutes on the subway when you can buy it closer to home?
These strategic considerations are multiplied tenfold when planning a vegan Thanksgiving dinner for a group. Plenty of standard things in the states just don’t really exist here. Canned pumpkin? Nope. Cranberries? Very hard to find. Bread crumbs? Different. Out-of-season green beans? Ooof. You get the gist.
And on top of that, we’re buying WAY more volume than normal to feed the crowd we invited.
Friendsgiving Dinner
We hosted friendsgiving dinner at our place and invited our architect Miguel and his family (Portuguese), a vegan nutritionist (Polish), and her friend (Brazilian). Plus two American friends stopped by for wine before they headed to another expat dinner.
Entertaining 8 people for a sit-down feast was a much larger undertaking than we expected. We visited no less than 7 grocery stores over the course of 10+ visits to acquire all the things we needed to make a traditional thanksgiving spread. It truly was a treasure hunt, especially for the non-standard items.
The menu included green bean casserole, stuffing, mashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, bourbon-glazed carrots, cranberry sauce, meatloaf, and Hilary’s signature pumpkin cheesecake. She even had to make her own pumpkin puree since we couldn’t find canned pumpkin anywhere. It was by far the best version she’s ever made.
We shared some of the lore and history behind the holiday with our Thanksgiving newbies. At dinner we all shared "gratefuls" and then ate way too much food, per tradition.
Bonus points: Miguel’s kids had never seen canned whipped cream (called “chantilly” over here) before and were mesmerized by it. We let them take the can home along with some leftover dessert.
Dancing Queens and Retro Scenes
Since our last week was filled with the stress and anxiety of planning Friendsgiving, we needed to decompress. Hilary found just the ticket: drag queen bingo at Bar of Soap, the little queer-inclusive bar that’s near our under-construction apartment.
On the way to DQB, we stopped at an old-school rooftop hotel bar that Miguel had clued us into. This place is a time capsule from the 60s… midcentury modern luxury in all its glory, all original.
The night was filled with style, singing, dancing, and of course, bingo. Neither of us actually got a bingo, but we both took to the stage to lip-sync for our lives and received plenty of applause from the packed house. It was a total blast.
Need some upbeat tunes to propel you into the holiday season? The new Flevans album just dropped, and I’ve had it running on repeat. Thanks to Won M. for getting this album in my rotation!
What are your upcoming holiday plans? Share!
Until next time…
Loving these write ups, Don. As someone who wants to live abroad (and will, dammit!), they're such a great peek into what that will feel like. And kudos to you for inspecting every grocery store in Porto for the vegan feast; sounds amazing! Looking forward to catching one with y'all when we're living over there, BOOYAH.
Sure but if you don't have to run to 5 or 10 different stores that simplifies life and the delivery fee is very small. But we do tip generously.