An International Thanksgiving - Sam learns how to make stuffing

You know, when you go abroad you expect to learn certain things, like (the obvious one) language, circumlocution (someone prepared for those SATs), local customs, and other issues related to living in another country. But I never would have guessed that studying abroad would be when I finally taught myself how to cook.
And it's not even that I learned how to cook French food, but that I've finally made the effort to legitimately cook for myself and not just throw something in a microwave or sauté some frozen gyoza in a frying pan. I managed to make some fairly edible grilled cheese, if I do say so myself, though I had to figure out what cheese to use for it since there's no cheddar or american here. By the way: emmenthal worked just fine, in case you were wondering.
And then I held my own Thanksgiving here - and I never thought dinner parties would ever be my thing! I found some recipes for stuffing on the internet and threw together my own version of it with my Czech friend - that's right, I managed to create my own stuffing, and cook enough of it for about 20 people (though only about 15 came, so my tiny fridge is filled with leftovers).
The hardest part of it, though, was shopping for it - I've always thought the most stressful part would be the actual cooking, and I've always enjoyed grocery shopping in the past, but it was such a pain - and so unexpectedly difficult - to figure out how much of each thing to buy, and in what form (what kind of apple, how much bread...), and I think the fact that food is so different here didn't help, since things aren't as familiar.
But everything worked out suprisingly well. I didn't ruin any of the dishes I was involved in, and most people showed up with their own drinks/plates, so there was more than enough food for everyone, and I had my first international Thanksgiving. Who would have ever considered having shrimp/peas as a dish for Thanksgiving? Or a tarte à la praline? (By the way, delicious - I had never had pralines, but I run the danger of developping a taste for them.) I now want to make the German warm wine we had after the meal a new Thanksgiving tradition chez moi in the U.S.

In case you're curious, here's "Stuffing à la Sam and Iva":
* lots of bread - I got 3 half-loaves of this bread with a normal white inside and sourdough-like crust. But I think any French bread will taste good, honestly. I sliced it a bit and warmed it up in the oven before tearing it up to make the stuffing - people recommended it on websites to get it more dry and toasty - but didn't really have enough time to make it work. But I may do it in the future for bread in general, because oven-warmed bread is even more delicious. There was too much bread in relation to the rest of the stuff I had to mix in, so don't trust any of my proportions.
* Chicken broth - the recipe I found said to moisten the bread in water, but I definitely recommend using broth instead, since it adds a lovely, warm flavor to the bread.
* Chopped onions - I only did 2 and a half. I'm not a big onion fan, but it adds flavor.
* Apples - I think I chopped 3/4, a milder kind. I love apples in my stuffing! Next time, I'd add more, just because there was so little compared with the way-too-much bread.
* Celery - though I remembered I had chopped it halfway through, so only some of the stuffing had it.
* Chicken seasoning - I had no idea where to look for it in the grocery store, so I didn't bother, but my Czech friend had some Czech seasoning in her room. It was a little spicy, but great, and since we used the same flavoring for the turkey, they went better together.
Now, I didn't have a full-fledged turkey to cook with - thank God - but breasts, so to cook the stuffing, we made these boxes out of foil. Then we put these larges box-bags (sealed) into the oven to cook for an hour or so. I opened up the boxes for the last 15 minutes-ish to get the stuffing browner. It worked out well, but sometimes the stuffing stuck to the foil and was hard to separate, so if you use foil yourself, you should probably look into avoiding that (with something like PAM or oil?), but it wasn't that bad.

Word of the Day:
la farce
You may recognize the word farce as a satirical, silly piece of theater/literature, but it's also a word for stuffing (in food - not stuffing like when I worked at Build a Bear). Olives with stuff inside are olives farcies