The best pumpkin pie ever...

This past Saturday Ines, I, and several friends celebrated Thanksgiving. We missed the actual Thanksgiving holiday (Thursday) for several reasons. I was out of town at an interview (which went fairly well), and everyone else was working. On Saturday, however, we made many of the traditional Thanksgiving foods, such as turkey, stuffing, and sweet potatoes, so it definitely felt like Thanksgiving...the only thing missing was football. The most entertaining of our cooking enterprises was the pumpkin pie, the traditional Thanksgiving dessert. We started the day by going to the farmer's market in Kassel. Though there were several people selling pumpkins, we decided that it would be easier to buy pumpkin pieces in a jar. Good idea? Apparently not. We soon learned that all pumpkin sold in jars is in a sweet and sour sauce (think pickles), which is not so desirable for pie-making. After this realization, we made trips to about 5 different supermarkets looking for a real, whole pumpkin. No dice. Because I insisted that we have a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving, we decided to try making the pickled pumpkins into a pie. After mixing all the ingredients together, we had a pretty good looking pumpkin pie mix. We even added enough sugar to hide any sour taste. We put the pie into the oven confident that we'd soon have a decent pie. A half hour later, we were disappointed to discover that our pie did not solidify at all. It was totally liquid. To make it more solid, we tried cooking it some more and then we tried cooling it off...both methods helped make it more solid, but I wouldn't call either a solution. The pie was still rather fluid. Though it wasn't perfect, the pie still tasted pretty damn good. Where's the point in this anecdote? It's this: make pumpkin pie the american way, from a can. Yeah, it is much easier to buy pumpkin pie in a can. Problem is that you can only buy pumpkin pie in a can in the U.S. (as far as I know). I gotta add this to the list of things to bring back from stateside visits.