Gobblerfest International - WHOOP!!!

Well folks, the 7th Annual Gobblerfest (aka: “Gobblerfest International”) was held on Saturday November 11th in both London, England & in College Station, Texas and both were *HUGE* successes, as usual. Stuart and I hosted the one here in London obviously and Tasha and Kendyl (my old A&M roomies) hosted the other dinner in College Station.

For those of you that don’t know, the origin of Gobblerfest dates way back to the fall of 2000 when I was in college at Texas A&M and cooked up the idea of hosting a Thanksgiving celebration amongst friends that year before we all went home for the holidays. My roomies and I weren’t sure what to expect that first year but it was a HUGE success! We cooked an entire traditional Thanksgiving dinner complete with a 20 pound turkey, 10 pound ham, cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie and rolls. It was quite a feast!

Gobblerfest soon became an annual celebration with all of us, each year with more people and more food. For year 3 back in 2002, we decided to have T-shirts printed for the event and continued the tradition every year since. This year, Tasha, Kendyl and I knew the shirts had to be *CLASSIC* because of the fact that one of the dinners was being held in England, the location from which the “mistreated Pilgrims” fled back in the 1600’s. So as you can see we did the best we could to embody the true spirit of Gobblerfest in its new (although temporary) location. :-)

We ended up having about 18 or so people that came over for the event and the food was great. However, it was a bit of a task trying to find a turkey this early in the holiday season since the Brits obviously don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. I ended up finding a turkey through a higher-end grocery store over here called Waitrose, but had to order TWO of them b/c they were each less than 10 pounds. Since I don’t have a car over here I ended up ordering all of the groceries from Waitrose’s online grocery delivery service (Ocado) and scheduled two shipments. Had to arrange for two shipments due to the ridiculously small size of a refrigerator that we have here in London. Imagine what you had in your dorm room at college, and that’s what I was working with! HA!

Stuart and I ended up cooking the first turkey (Fred Senior) on Friday night and carved him up so he’d be ready to go on Saturday. Then we cooked the second turkey (Fred Junior) on Saturday afternoon. That was followed by throwing the 3 small hams (The Three Little Pigs) in the oven as well. In between we did all of the potato peeling, dressing prep, green bean washing, and other important food prep tasks. Made for a very busy Saturday!

All of the Brits seemed to have a great time that night, although many had questions about what Thanksgiving back in the States is all about and why we celebrate such a strange holiday. I then told the story of Gobblerfest of course. A couple of people actually asked if they should be ashamed (as Brits) to be celebrating a holiday that celebrates the fact that the Pilgrims fled their homeland - and of course I just laughed!

The evening finally ended around midnight and I was left with yet again more great Gobblerfest memories…