Thanksgiving part 1: the process of preparation

We were pretty ambitious for a Congolese American Thanksgiving. The plan was to have a meal including grilled chicken, green beans, macaroni and cheese, fried plantains, mashed squash, avocado and cucumber salad, rolls, sliced mangos, passion fruit Fanta and pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread for dessert; both of these made with squash instead of pumpkin.

Orcxance was fantastic doing the shopping and getting everything we requested. We ditched the green beans because we couldn’t find any, and we also had to give up the cheese aspect of macaroni and cheese, but Esther made a nice white sauce and cut up little pieces and sausage to put in it instead. Everything else went pretty much as planned.

The main challenge of the day was the baking. As my readers know, we don’t have an oven, and in the past we’ve used a neighbor’s wood burning oven which is difficult to stabilize the temperature, as one might expect. This is what ovens here look like:

The plan was to go down the road to where a man bakes bread to sell. He does this every day until about noon so we asked permission, then went and confirmed the time we could go, and then prepped everything Thanksgiving morning at the house before taking it there.

We had chopped, boiled and mashed the squash the day before, using our charcoal stove outside.

That process alone took hours, and I had a distant memory of what it was like to dump purée pumpkin out of a can.

We saved the seeds for planting.

I also made caramel coconut the day before as one of Orcxance’s favorite desert items to add to the menu, peeling and grating all the coconut and cooking with sugar. This process is described in a previous blog post, but this is what it looks like finished:

Orcxance paid someone to do the chicken for us since that is a whole journey in itself and we really might have run out of time.

Anyway, we left the mashed squash in the fridge overnight and got up early Thursday morning to wake ourselves up with coffee and get going on the day’s work.

We had fixings to make 3 pies and “pumpkin” (squash) bread in several of the handmade cake pans that Orcxance bought me last year. After some searching I located where I’d written down the pumpkin bread recipe from Grandmother as well as the pie recipe. Good thing because none of my family saw my text about sending me the recipe! For your benefit, here it is:

Molly and Eileen enjoyed helping press the pie crust into our makeshift pie pans. Between getting the food prepped and feeding the baby, the morning flew by. Thankfully a friend has been staying over and she washed a mountain of dishes while Esther and I made food.

Since we couldn’t mix up everything until arriving at our destination, we had a lot to carry. Some little neighborhood kids showed up at the door right as we were getting ready to go, which was perfect as they helped us carry everything.

We got to the bakery before the man was done so we dropped everything off and went back to the house, buying some Congolese donuts on the way to fortify our selves and our team of little carriers.

The sun came out strong and hot only to dissolve into a sprinkle of rain a little while later. We were sweating buckets by the time we got back to the house. I nursed the baby again, left her with our friend, and Esther, Molly, Eileen and I headed back to the bakery.

The baker was very accommodating and let us use one oven while he used the other one, since he wasn’t finished yet. He also helped us get things in and out of the oven each time, and chopped wood for the fire. While we were waiting we thought of some things to be thankful for: the good food, helpful people and “my baby stister,” to name a few.

The pies burnt around the edges of the crusts but we were pretty happy that nothing totally burnt up and that it cooked through to the middle. What happens sometimes is the outside burns and the middle is doughy. That was my concern for the breads, but it was fine.

Esther’s idea was to add chocolate chips to the pumpkin bread, and since we can’t buy those here, she found some mini chocolate bars and chopped them up small to mix with the batter.

We stayed at the bakery for a while getting everything baked. It was quite a process. The only way to control the oven temp is to pull wood out of the bottom or add more in. Esther bought the girls some fruit juice to enjoy while we waited.

It was threatening rain by the time we were done but thankfully our little team of helpers showed up on their way home from school and we sent them to the house carrying the pies. We couldn’t have carried everything in one trip. Esther and I took the remaining stuff and with the girls in tow we went back to the house, collecting Thanksgiving dinner guests along the way.

Back at the house it was time to feed Aravis again, clean up the girls and put them down for their nap, and make sure everything was covered to keep off the hoards of flies that got into our kitchen. Esther prepared the macaroni and sausage while listening to an audiobook, and seasoned the squash and I laid down for a few minutes, tired but very thankful that Aravis had a pretty good night so my day was not a foggy-headed struggle.

That’s all for part 1, check back soon for Thanksgiving part 2.