Pumpkin? Pie?

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Ah, Thanksgiving- turkey, pumpkin pie, family, buttery-pan rolls…. I wasn’t really sure how I would be spending Thanksgiving this year. We had talked about making some kind of dinner, or at least pumpkin pie, but we had also talked about taking advantage of the 3-day weekend to travel somewhere. (Colombians don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, but since we are supposed to be a bilingual school we celebrate some of the American holidays as well. We actually had school on Thanksgiving, but then had the next day off in honor of Thanksgiving.) Anyways, we decided to go for the full meal deal.

First of all we needed to find the ingredients. The grocery stores don’t carry turkey, cranberries, Crisco, pumpkin, or sweet potatoes. So, we had to do some improvising. Personally, my first priority was the pumpkin pie. How can you have Thanksgiving without it? Pie-making is serious business in my family.

Here’s the “pumpkin” that we found. I don’t know what it actually is, but it looked kind of like a pumpkin.

When we got back home and cut it open it did actually look and smell like a pumpkin!

I must confess that even with all my pie-snobbery, I've always made pumpkin pie from a can. After some advice from Sally and Alex via skype, (and a few hours) the pumpkin was ready to go.

But what about the crust? No Crisco... and no pie plate! hmmm....
After consulting with Dave's mom on video chat, I decided to go with more of a bar approach. And so here is the final product. Is it pumpkin? Maybe. Is it pie? Not really.

Somehow it still tasted like thanksgiving.

Of course the pie wasn’t the only thing. We made a chicken, mashed potatoes, salad and a “sweet potato” puree. Also, Dave has an oven and I don’t. My kitchen table is bigger. Our solution was to cook at Dave’s, pack up the meal, and take a cab over to my apartment. So we loaded our backpacks with food, and piled everything into a cab. The cab driver didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary, but I thought it was pretty funny.

When all was said and done, there were seven of us at the dinner: Dave, Elizabeth, and I as well as a couple of our Colombian co-workers. I am definitely thankful for my new Colombian and North American friends.