Most of you know this blog started out as a cooking blog. Cooking is my thing. I love to browse for recipes, shop for ingredients, and spend a whole day in the kitchen. Since I’ve been in Indonesia on my two Fulbright grants, I’ve done a lot less cooking then I used to, and my blog turned from a cooking blog to a travel blog.
However, this year I’ve been much more adventuresome in the kitchen. Last weekend we hosted a Friendsgiving complete with mashed potatoes, stuffing, and pumpkin pie! I scoured the internet for simple ingredient/stovetop recipes, seeing as we don’t have a stove, and as there were all a success, I figured they might come in handy for future Fulbrighters/expats wanting to experience a Thanksgiving of their own, but with very limited resources and ingredients. Thus, here are our recipes!
- 10 medium russet potatoes
- 2 tablespoons salt
- 8 oz “cooking cream” (what we found in Indo or heavy cream/half and half if you can find it or milk if you want to be super cheap)
- 3 gloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 cup butter, softened
- 1/2 tablespoon (ish) salt
- Wash, peel, and dice the potatoes. Place in a large saucepan or wok and cover with water. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to maintain a rolling boil. Add salt. Cook for about 15-20 minutes – until the potatoes are soft and fall apart with pierced with a fork.
- When potatoes are almost done cooking, heat the cooking cream and garlic over medium heat until simmering. Remove from heat and set aside.
- Drain the potatoes, move to a large bowl, and mash them.
- Pour the garlic cream mixture over the potatoes and mix it all together. We then moved it to a rice cooker to keep it warm while we prepared the other food. Just before serving, stir in the softened butter and additional salt, to taste.
Garlic cream sauce
The almost-finished mashed potatoes!
TheĀ original recipe for this came from Alton Brown and I only modified the proportions, and took out the parmesan cheese.
Sorry, apparently I can only add one fancy looking recipe in each post – but I want them all here so I’ll have to make do.
We based our sweet potato recipe off of this recipe from Tyler Florence. We made ours more of a mashed version, but flavor-wise it was this! (We bought non-orange sweet potatoes so it turned out really ugly and gross-looking but it was delicious so… no picture š )
Our no-bake pumpkin pie was more of a challenge but in the end, it turned out to be pretty simple and delicious!
First, I bought a pumpkin,Ā halved it, scooped out the goop, chopped it into big slices, and boiled the slices until soft.Ā 
It took about 20 minutes to get them soft and then I pulled them out, let them cool, and peeled off the skin. I stuck it in a tupperware to cool and came back to it later!
I used this recipe for a no-bakeĀ crust. We couldn’t find graham crackers here so we bought a similar type of cracker and it worked out fine (we used the Indo brown Malkist crackers). I also used less sugar than the recipe called for, per the reviews. Oh, and we couldn’t find normal size round pans so we bought smaller ones and had enough for two pies! (This recipe was enough for two smaller pies)
We followed the directions exactly – crush the crackers, mix it all together, press it into a pie pan, and refrigerate for an hour before pouring in the filling. Ā And when we served it, we had no trouble getting it out of the pan or keeping it together – my initial concerns with a no-bake crust.
I used this recipe for the filling – it was delicious!! Gelatin is a no-no here (Muslim community) so I used a substitute, agar, instead. It came out of the package red and we were worried it would taste like strawberry… but it didn’t so don’t fret! Only other differences were fresh ginger and my pumpkin, but otherwise we followed it to a T. AND IT WAS SO GOOD. I WILL NEVER GO BACK TO CANNED PUMPKIN EVER AGAIN.
Cooking the pumpkin mixture
Ready to chill!
After pouring the filling into the pies, we put both in the refridgerator and within an hour it seemed ready to serve but we didn’t use them for another three hours or so.
The final things we made was stuffing! We were really unsure about this one since we didn’t have an oven and were worried about finding all of the ingredients. But in the end, it turned out perfect!!
We used this recipe for a stovetop stuffing. Edits:
- Didn’t use a crusty loaf because we couldn’t find one. Instead we used a regular loaf of whole wheat bread (from the bakery at Hypermart) and cut it the night before and left it out to dry
- 1 regular onion (not 2)
- Couldn’t find celery so we swapped it for two diced apples
- 6 cloves of garlic (not 3)
- No sage (couldn’t find it)
- Dried thyme, rosemary, and Trader Joe’s 21 Spices Seasoning (~1 tablespoon of each? I can’t remember)
Basically, we doubled the herby goodness. We initially made it as the recipe called for but it smelled so damn good and didn’t seem like enough so we doubled it (kinda).
We made a lucky find of thyme and rosemary seasoning the night before in a random little grocery store and that was clutch. The TJ’s seasoning Kate had brought from home.
We followed the actual directions exactly and it tasted unbelievably good. I couldn’t believe I was smelling those smells and tasting that in Kendari!
So that’s what we did! It all turned out fantastically and we were thrilled! If you want to attempt your own Thanksgiving feast, I’d recommend these recipes (and modifications!)
