An American Sherpa Thanksgiving

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!

 Apple pie. mmmm.....

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!