Our fifth consecutive Thanksgiving out of the U.S.  A tricky holiday, when you are overseas. As great as turkey is (low fat, lots of meat at a low price) and as great as the holiday is (a meal with family/friends with football) … it just doesn’t translate well anywhere that isn’t Canada.

How have we handled it?

In 2008, we did a Thanksgiving-style lunch at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.

In 2009, our first year in Abu Dhabi, we patched together a fairly traditional Thanksgiving meal, using someone else’s apartment and kitchen, and there were six of us there, five Yanks and a Brit who was bemused by the whole deal.

In 2010, we were somehow invited to a big day-after-Thanksgiving event in an Abu Dhabi suburb, on the mainland. I just reread that entry and I’m still hazy on how we got there … and I’m fairly certain that I have never again seen all but two of the people at that house.

Last year, it was Thanksgiving in Paris, at the start of a vacation there. That turned out fairly well, but France is not much easier on someone trying to do “traditional U.S. Thanksgiving” than is the Gulf.

This year?

Funny story.

We just moved, right? Everything we owned came over to the new apartment on Saturday. On Monday, the guys from Ikea came and built about two-thirds of the furniture in the place. This was an ongoing project, see?

Leah had the idea that we would be settled enough that she could do a real Thanksgiving in her own kitchen — for the first time in a long time. But in reality, it just wasn’t ready. Plus, she worked Thursday; the idea that she could start preparations before an 11-to-7 shift and then serve dinner? Not actually realistic.

So, what we did was invite over our co-worker and friend Curt, who is from Louisiana by way of Hawaii, and we popped the cork on a bottle of “Champagne” from South Africa (brand name: Pongracz, and I recommend it). We toasted the new place and the holiday, and killed that bottle while we sat in the living room with the lights off and looked at the lights and towers of Abu Dhabi out the window …

But eventually we did, in fact, need to eat something.

And I insisted we all go to Desert Burger (pictured above). It is just down the street from the front door of our building … and how can you not eat at a place named Desert Burger? Especially when it is lit up brightly/garishly — at least by UAE standards.

So, we walked into the teeny place, and realized it was more like one of the cafeteria-like/juice bars that are so popular here, with food almost a secondary pursuit. It had exactly one table, seating three, and there we went.

The owner/maitre d’/waiter took our order and, in the classiest way possible, shouted each order back to the cook (in Urdu, I believe) as we announced them. “Beef burger! … veggie burger!”

(It reminded me of the classic Saturday Night Live sketch based on a resto in Chicago, I believe it was, where no one quite spoke English and “cheeseburger” was the only option.)

Actually, Desert Burger had two pages of burger options, including the beef burger and veggie burger but also the Cajun burger, the jumbo shrimps burger, the chicken thighs burger, the mutton burger and the Tandoori burger.

The burgers were fine. Mostly. Leah reported the beef burger to be “a little odd” … but Curt loved his “Zinker burger” … and I confess that I had gone the safe route, with the veggie burger, and let them try the other stuff.  The burgers came with fries.

My veggie burger was eight dirhams, or about $2.15, and the others were a but more. We actually spent more money on the fruit drinks; I had the small “Burj Al Emarat” drink, for about $2.40, and it was a big glass of slushy fruit, watermelon in the upper half of the glass, mango in the lower half. Very nice.

We liked it well enough to take a menu home with us. (See below.) Desert Burger delivers, and they appear to be open till 1 a.m.

(Oh, and I just discovered their slogan, on the menu: “Healthy Food for Happy Life.” I love that.)

And that was Thanksgiving Day, 2012. Kinda weird, totally random, and perhaps memorable.