I just wanted to share with everyone how my Thanksgiving went. As you may or may not know, I am the only American working at the Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Resources (RIVER), as well as the only American at the Rishi Valley School. And by "American," I mean "Russian." I guess what I'm really trying to say is that no one here has ever heard of Thanksgiving.
This past week, we had a guest staying with us. Tony Anderson is a volunteer for Open Learning Exchange in Nepal, an organization that works to enhance the One Laptop Per Child project. Mr. Anderson brought us some laptops, a server, and a bunch of great new ideas on incorporating laptops into our classrooms and, more importantly, how to improve (and essentially fix) the OLPC project through our methodology. In this way, we could very easily provide fantastic educational opportunities to thousands upon thousands of kids in Rwanda, Mongolia, Uruguay, Brazil, Nepal, etc. Since he's so awesome and brought laptops, the bosses wanted to show him a good time. Thus, when I mentioned pumpkin pie and Mr. Anderson seemed excited, they said they'd arrange whatever was needed to make this work.
Awesome.
Now, I've never made pumpkin pie before. This is probably because you can buy a pumpkin pie in the store in America for way less than what it would cost to actually bake one. The store bought ones are quite delicious, and our family is usually in a turkey coma before getting to the pie, anyway, so it doesn't matter much. I love cooking/baking, so I thought I could handle making a pumpkin pie. I made a list of ingredients.
We planned to start making the pumpkin pie by 3pm on Thursday, so it would be cooled and ready to serve after dinner. Mmm mm mm. We were so excited.
The first snag in the plan came when I found out there was no evaporated milk anywhere near Rishi Valley. No one has even heard of it. I decided to search for another recipe, and found one that called for heavy cream. I ordered that from the office. Apparently, it was all sold out in Madanapalle (the nearby town) and would not be available until the Monday after Thanksgiving. Fail. I did some research, and decided it was appropriate to substitute condensed milk for evaporated milk. I decided to not use any sugar, because the condensed milk would take care of the sweetening. Okay, we're back on track.
This is still going to be awesome!Wednesday night, I received a pressure cooker (for the pumpkin) and a mixer. I though I would use the kitchen by my apartment to prepare the pie, and then head to my bosses' house (they're an AWESOME power couple) to bake the pie.
On Thursday, I started to make the dough. I mixed all the ingredients and kneaded that shit and it even tasted a little bit like dough. The recipe called for the dough to be refrigerated, as that makes some sort of science-y process (social science represent!) happen to make it more delicious. After half an hour of running around and trying to get the keys to the kitchen, which has a fridge in it, I finally figured this out. Also, in the process of making the dough, I was brought all of my requested ingredients: pumpkin, eggs, sugar, salt, cinnamon, cloves, ginger. The ginger was just a dry piece of ginger. It was in no way in powder form. The cinnamon was in little bits of bark. The cloves were also in a weird flowery shape thingy. (It turns out, I don't know what cloves are!) The day before, there were jokes made about me pounding away at a mortar and pestal, bu the only problem was I wasn't given a mortar and pestal. But I had no time to worry about this, because we were already a little behind schedule. AND we had another new development: I was brought a microwave oven manual.
Um...they couldn't possibly be thinking that when I said "oven," I meant "microwave," right? I mean an oven is an oven! This is a PIE for Bob's sake! I really hope they just want me to catch up on my reading of manuals... There's a real oven waiting for me somewhere, right? Right?With the dough chilling in the fridge, I went to the Directors' Office with Tony for a meeting. We were presenting some ideas about next steps in collaboration with Nepal and Rwanda. Right before we left to walk to the Office, the chai-wallah comes to me with a bike, on which I see a microwave in a blanket tied to the backseat.
Oh, fuck. He politely implores me to open the kitchen and places the microwave on my kitchen counter. He is beaming. I thank him.
Oh, fuuuuuuck. We enter the Directors' Office.
"So, um...this oven? Did you mean microwave oven? Because I meant oven oven. Dry heat oven. I-need-to-cook-this-pie-at-two-hundred-degrees-Celsius-for-an-hour-oven. Do you have one of those?"
Laughter.
"Oh, Tanya. We have not cooked anything for the 23 years we have lived at Rishi Valley! Can you get creative? Can we innovate? Can we improvise an oven?"
Improvise an oven?! Double fuck."...I don't know how to improvise an oven."
But we laughed. And I remembered that I had that Nestle chocolate bar in my room. So maybe Thanksgiving tea could be salvaged...
The meeting went on for two hours. It was kind of awesome (I love my job). Then, I went back to the kitchen, and tried to improvise.
First, I decided to go ahead and cook the pumpkin. My first time using a pressure cooker was a success. Woo woo me. While the pumpkin was pressurizing, I used the rolling pin to pound the shit out of the cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. It was a very loud process. I think I might've scared some children. But no matter! This pumpkin pie was going to work. Or at least it would get as close to working as I could possibly get it.
Just keep hope alive. The pounding process actually did wonders for relieving all that microwave hate. And, oooh, the pumpkin was finally ready!
But it was dinner time. So we left for the 12 minute walk to main campus to eat. They served toast with dinner, which somehow seemed somewhat related to Thanksgiving. We gave thanks. We ate rice and sambar. We smiled at each other.
Back at the Rural Education Center, I peeled the cooled pumpkin and put it in the mixer. I'm pretty sure this mixer was made in 1977 or somewhere around that time, because it was big and scary but the container that held the ingredients to be blended was no more than a cup. It's okay. I can divide the pumpkin and blend in stages.
Just keep hope alive. This is also when I noticed that the one pumpkin they brought me only had enough flesh for one pie. All the other ingredients I had, including the batches of dough I made for the crusts, were calculated for two pies.
I guess one pie is better than no pie. And so, the adventure continued. I mixed my freshly-powdered spices with the pumpkin puree, added egg, the wrong kind of milk, and mixed. It looked ... like ... something. I've never made pumpkin pie, so I had no idea what it was supposed to look like. It was very orange and kind of creamy and smelled like sugar from the condensed milk.
Earlier, Tony and I had inspected the aforementioned microwave oven manual, where it had mentioned a "grill" option. Apparently, the microwave that now stood in my kitchen could actually produce real heat, as well as microwave heatwaves. This seemed very interesting. I'm pretty sure it would explode before ever reaching 375F, but...uh...we could try? We decided to compromise (with the microwave) and cook the filling separately from the crust. This way, if the crust failed, we could still salvage the pie part. Wrap it in a chappati, maybe? I poured the filling into the microwave-safe pan (this came with the microwave manual), and set it on grill/microwave combination cooking option. But now, it was late, and it was time to go to the Directors' House for Thanksgiving tea. I went into my room and retrieved the candy bar.
Welp, Happy Thanksgiving. The tea was very nice. We sat in a circle by candlelight and discussed the issues affecting education in the world today. We said what we were thankful for this year. It was nice. It felt familiar. We smiled.
At 11:15pm, I was back in my kitchen (now being ravaged by ants), preparing to combat this pumpkin pie. Or...pumpkin mess, at this point. I started the microwave back up.
Seriously, a microwave? Really, India? In twenty minutes, the pumpkin mess took on a brownish orange color (just like it should) and had the consistency of a legitimate pumpkin pie. The knife came out clean in the center. I set it to cool. I rolled out the dough and placed it in the other bowl.
If this bowl isn't microwave-safe, the microwave could possibly be damaged. But then again, it's a microwave. And I hate it. And I have to make this work. Fuck it, I'll take my chances. I checked the status of the dough repeatedly, and after 25 minutes, it looked and tasted just like legitimate baked pie crust.
Holy shit, SUCCESS. How did this happen in a microwave?!? I loaded the second half of the rolled out dough and put 25 minutes on the timer. I crumbled the dough on top of the pumpkin mess. Suddenly, it seemed less messy. I had succeeded in making upside-down pumpkin pie. MICROWAVED upside-down pumpkin pie. I covered it with a towel and set it all to cool.
On Friday morning, Indian Standard Time, I took out the pie and set it in front of my co-workers in the English Room. It was just after dinner-time back in Texas, exactly the time when my family would be rolling out the pumpkin pie anyway. I cut square pieces (the pan was square) and appropriated them within the group. We dug in. The Indians were brave, not even reluctant. And, you know, the pie was actually pretty good. It tasted a lot more pumpkin-y than it would have if I had bought it from the HEB bakery, but the crust was wonderfully flaky and set off the sweetness from the condensed milk. The Indians really liked it. Everyone had second helpings.
And everyone said thank you.
This year, there are a lot of things to be thankful for. Among my favorite things, I am thankful for the fact that each day in India, I learn something new, something extraordinary. Today, it was how to make a microwavable upside-down pumpkin pie. The possibilities for tomorrow are endless.
Happy Thanksgiving.
With lots of love from Rishi Valley.
