Tonight is the evening of our Christmas Dinner here with the International Office, and while they are providing the main course, they asked us students to bring something that might be a traditional dish from home, or just something we especially like. My very favorite part of both Thanksgiving and Christmas is pumpkin pie, and I was quite said to miss out on the Thanksgiving edition pumpkin pie, so I decided to not miss out on Christmas by making my own. However, I had no idea what this entailed....
Thankfully my friend Stacy from Ohio State who lives on the floor below me has a recipe from her mom who has made homemade pumpkin pie practically every year of her life. How awesome? (No comparison here, Mom, I swear, I love Mrs. Smiths. Heck, before Stacy told me, I wasn't even aware you COULD make pumpkin pie with an actual pumpkin.) But that is just what we did.
So we bought an actual pumpkin. (No idea that pumpkins had other uses after Halloween, however thankfully there's a store nearby that sells every vegetable under the sun...including pumpkins.) Well, we actually bought half of a pumpkin. While standing in line at the store, Stacy commented that the one and only large size of pumpkin they had would be enough that we'd be eating pumpkin for weeks. So the guy at the register offered to cut it in half for us and only sell us half the pumpkin for half the price. Sweet deal.
The pumpkin has to bake for an hour or more in the oven to soften it up enough to scrape out the insides. This was the boring sit and wait part. Then you scrape the meaty part of the pumpkin (as Stacy called it, I found nothing meaty about it) into a bowl and puree it with this fun pureeing stick thing. I kind of made a mess with that, splattering both me and Stacy with pumpkin bits. (It washes out I swear...) To the now liquid-y pudding like pumpkin we added evaporated milk, sugar, cinnamon and other spices, and eggs. Then we got to further beat it into submission until it was entirely a liquid.
The crust was more difficult that I had imagined. We were originally going to make that as well, but we had conflicting class schedules and some last minute engagements that came up, and we didn't have time. I thought surely one could buy a premade crust here...but not so much. The best we could find was sheets of crust-dough. So we molded them into our form and used water to make it glue itself all together (hopefully we don't find any leaks...). That done, we poured our pie mixture into it and set it in the oven to bake. It smelled delicious.
So now I am on my way in the next hour or so to my last class of the evening which we are getting out of early in time to make it to our Dinner at 7pm. I have to carry the pie with me to class, so I'm crossing my fingers it survives the trip okay. And sitting next to me smelling all pumpkin-y good for 2 hours...
