Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. I love the opportunity to spend time with
family and friends, eat delicious food, and give thanks to God for how amazing
he is to us (and watch a bit of football).
I have been away from the states for more than 7 months now, so with
Thanksgiving approaching, I really wanted to try to recreate at least a taste
of it over here. Thus I determined that
we were going to have our own American, Sherpa Thanksgiving here in Sikkim.
First I wrote a menu that I thought we would be able to pull
off over here. I searched the internet
for recipes and had to consider the limited availability of ingredients as well
as the fact that we wouldn’t have an oven to cook in.
Our Thanksgiving Menu
Roasted Chicken
Mashed Potatoes
Green Beans
Stuffing
Rolls with butter
Fruit Salad
Pumpkin Pie
Apple Pie
Whipped Cream
At least a week beforehand I started gathering
ingredients. I could never have pulled
this off without Passang. He talked with
neighbors and local family members to try to source all of the
ingredients. He tried to get us a
turkey, but when we found out that it would cost about $120 US for one turkey
we decided that chicken would suffice.
Passang bought the chickens from a local farm. Our house raised chickens tend to be much
smaller than the farm-raised ones since we don’t give them hormones. We went with the drugged up variety for this
event to make sure we had enough meat for everyone.
Here is before picture of our thanksgiving ‘turkey’
One of our cousins had some pumpkins left over from their crop
this year and gave one to us. I was so
amazed at how sweet this pumpkin was when it was when I cooked the flesh. I would eat this thing just by itself, it was
really good!
Most of the spices I found in whole form from local vendors. The local cardamom was donated by my
mother-in-law.
The before picture of our pumpkin pie
My amazing cousin made us fresh butter to use for our
meal. Most of it went into my pie crusts
which were surprisingly good.
Our Butter
My mother-in-law has a cow that is producing milk right now
(we have a cow too, but right now it’s not producing) so I got milk from her. I ended up getting about 3 or 4 litters of milk. I put it in the fridge overnight so that the
cream would separate and then skimmed the cream off in the morning. I used the cream for whipped cream and in the
pumpkin pie.
Skimming cream off of milk
I made the dough for the rolls a couple days beforehand and
just kept it in the fridge. The day
before I made my pie crusts, cooked the pumpkin and scooped out the flesh, and
did a trial run on baking the rolls.
Since we don’t have an oven, the baking processes proved to be a big
challenge. Passang got a couple of pans
from our neighbor. I think they are cast
iron, but they are quite shallow and don’t have any lids to go with them. We used one of the pans on top of some coals with
an aluminum lid and more coals on top. The
trial run went ok with just a little bit of burning on the bottom of the
rolls. Not too bad for a first try.
Thanksgiving Day started out great. After I was done teaching my tuition class in
the morning, Passang and I got to work. He
started out by grinding all of the spices by hand. We use a flat rock and a round rock to grind things here.
Cinnamon Cardamom
Nutmeg
I started peeling the apples for my apple pie. I didn’t have much of an option in the apples
I used.
They don’t grow them around
here, so we have to buy ones that get imported from elsewhere in India. When I went to buy my apples I asked the
fruit shop owner if he had any sour apples.
He responded by proudly stating that his apples are all “Ek dam gulio”
or “So very sweet” and then proceeded to laugh at me when I told him that I
actually wanted sour apples.
In the end, these Kashmiri apples, although
a little mealy, actually produced a pretty fantastic pie.
At some point during the morning I went to the fridge to
look for my cream and discovered that some of it was missing. Turns out that my wonderful husband had
decided to used the 1.5 cups of cream that I had painstakingly skimmed off of the milk make his morning coffee. Apparently he mistook it for left over milk. Thankfully it was actually the second skimming
so it was more like half and half so I still had the really creamy part that
I got from the first skimming. As a
punishment I made him grind up the 3 cups of sugar that I needed. :) The local sugar here is in much bigger
crystals than what we usually get in the US so we had to grind it up a bit finer
to incorporate well into the pies and whipped cream.
Our regular sugar
Passang scooping up the ground sugar
The sugar and spices already to be baked into pies!
I then mixed up my pumpkin pie, rolled out my first pie
crust, and put together my pumpkin pie.
Pie crust
In progress
Meanwhile Passang got the fire going.
He borrowed a little stove from my mother-in-law so that we could put it
close to our kitchen. We decided that we
would put the pie in one of the cast iron pans and then put the other one
upside down on top as a lid. With coals
below and on top, it made a pretty nice little oven.
Passang starting the fire with the help of our niece who decided to be camera shy all of a sudden.
It was working great until we heard a loud BANG! The pan on top had cracked right down the
middle! Apparently these types of pans
must not like to be used dry (the locals usually use them for frying). Thankfully the pie only suffered a little bit
of debris falling on it. We cleaned up
the mess, put some oil in the other pan in hopes that it would not suffer the
same fate, grabbed an aluminum lid and put that on top, and got back to
baking. It was a painstaking
process. We had to constantly tend the
coals, blowing on them and moving them around so that they were continuously supplying
heat.
The final set-up
Tending our oven
The top of the pie burned in the
middle from touching the lid, but after 1.5 hrs the pie was done!
I then put in my apple pie.
This time we used a bowl turned upside down as a lid because the apple
pie was taller. The apple pie was a
pain. The crust on top wouldn’t
cook. After over 3 hours of cooking I declared
it good enough and we took it out.
Tending our apple pie
Our apple pie!
The two pies
Then I put in my rolls while Passang got to cooking the
chickens. He decided to roast them over
a fire. His concept was pretty good, but
we really didn't have enough time to roast them properly. They started burning on the outside while
remaining raw in the inside. Eventually
he decided to take them off the fire, cut them into large pieces and fry them
in oil on the stove.
Passang roasting the chickens
The first batch of rolls took forever, I think because we weren't
as careful in tending the coals. My
sister-in-law finally took over the task, finished up the first batch and baked
up the second batch in half the time. I
cooked the stuffing, mashed potatoes and green beans, my sister-in-law whipped
up the whipped cream and the fruit salad, and eventually everything was ready.
Stuffing
Green Beans
Whipped cream! Everyone LOVED this!
My sister-in-law and niece with our Thanksgiving meal
The spread
Roast chicken (unfortunately not cooked through)
Of course we also had the traditional rice and dhal
(lentils) for those less adventurous in the group. Most of my family started off with some
chicken, rice, and dhal and then eventually started tasting the “American food.” They actually really liked it. I was surprised with how well everything turned
out. The chicken was SO good. The pumpkin pie was really sweet (too sweet
for my liking), I think because the pumpkin that I started with was really
sweet, but my family thought it was delicious!
They especially liked it with the whipped cream. I preferred the apple pie. The crust was still raw in a lot of places,
but the filling was SO good!
Our family enjoying Thanksgiving
In spite of all the mishaps and difficulties, we had a lot
of fun with our Thanksgiving. We learned
so many things for next year – I think we will probably try to get an oven
now. Everyone enjoyed the food, and we
had a great time celebrating with our family.
And we even had a few left-overs for the next day!