Be thankful and be yourself!

Does anyone want to try some Brazilian rice and beans?
Happy Thanksgiving!

Since I moved here from Brazil, celebrating Thanksgiving is something that is relatively new for us. We don’t have a lot of family in the U.S so we usually spend Thanksgiving with our close family friends which happen to be American. Therefore, we always leave it up to them to cook for us.

                Cooking a large turkey is not a Brazilian culture, in fact, not too many Brazilian know how to even prepare at turkey. The first time that we saw stuffing, we thought it looked like gross soggy bread and we didn’t understand why this was a meal. Although Brazilians do eat sweet potatoes, it is usually eaten as a dessert so it was weird seeing people put their sweet potatoes in the same plate as the turkey and stuffing. The only thing my mom would bring to our friends house was the pies, which we are also not used to because Brazilians don’t make apple and pumpkin pies. After watching our friends cook Thanksgiving dinner for a few years, we decided to make our own Thanksgiving dinner this year.

                My mom and I read all over the internet how to stuff a turkey, make stuffing and ham. We were extremely excited and proud of ourselves for finally making our own Thanksgiving dinner. My original plan was to take a picture of our dinner table and display our home cooked American style dinner, but due to the fact that we burnt the turkey, made the stuffing look like soup, and my little brother dropped the apple pie on the ground, that was impossible.

                So instead we decided to make our home cooked Brazilian rice and beans. We learned that it doesn’t matter what food you make, Thanksgiving is all about being thankful for being part of this country and this country is all about diversity so having rice and beans for Thanksgiving is okay!