Kabul Thanksgiving

I had been invited to my colleagues’ Cathy & Mike’s Thanksgiving day dinner. And since I had successfully made pumpkin pie from scratch in the Maldives, my ego volunteered me to reproduce said accomplishment for this dinner to feed 14 guests.

As luck would have it, the cultures of the world aligned and the Big Eid holiday coincided with the T-day weekend. Therefore, I had a significant amount of time to accomplish my mission. And if the guests could be trusted – many of whom were non-Americans – the pies were successful. But with any recipe from home, success depended upon a certain amount of creativity and intuition. But three hours of pumpkin cooking, followed by pureeing and draining, a rectangular pan as a second pie plate stand-in, cleaning a suspicious blender, estimating eggs, milk, sugar, pumpkin and pretty much every ingredient, the end product was edible and rather tasty – though strangely colored.

However, the biggest adventure during the pie making was navigating the oven. I have little experience with gas ovens, and no experience with lighting them. I had been warned that this one could be volatile, but still was not prepared for the mini-explosion that occurred when I lit it the first night. No injuries were sustained, and the next morning it lit rather gently. The oven was all bark and no bite because although I converted Fahrenheit degrees to Celsius, I’m pretty sure it didn’t matter since the pies required an extra half hour to bake.