10/4/2014... Missing home... and relieving homesickness with pumpkin

Hello, you lovely people!
During my stay in Thailand, I have thought about "back home," a little. Honestly, I don't really think about the United States that often, I have been too preoccupied being involved with what I am doing in the now, and my plans for the future. I am having so many adventures here, and I love it! Each experience, whether positive or negative, is teaching me a lot: about life, about emotional stability, about taking care of oneself, about patience, and especially about food tolerance. Every now and then, though, I have that slight tinge of nostalgia. I miss some of my favorites cities and towns and I really miss food. I'm not talking about the KFC or McDonalds, either. I can get that here, but I don't want to. I'm talking about the food I would eat during the holidays: pecan pie, fudge pecan pie, key lime pie, fried turkey, and fried okra. These, by far, are my comfort foods. In the mornings, I especially miss the Greek yoghurt and muffins. And what about Starbucks classic pumpkin cream cheese muffins? Those, I would gladly spend the $3.50 for the overpriced hunk of deliciousness.

So, what do I do about this terrible dilemma? Imported Pecans are around 650THB (That's over $20 for a pound of pecans....) So.... it better be an extremely special occasion for me to be shelling out that amount of of money. And turkey? Forget about it! Key lime pie is almost possible, but I have not seen graham crackers or (bleh!->) vanilla wafer cookies on the shelves of the stores here.

What about pumpkin? Well.... there is no canned pumpkin. In fact, what they have here is Japanese pumpkin, which looks like this:

Yeah, it's kind of weird looking, and the name is pretty awesome! In Thai, the word for Japanese pumpkin is this:

ฟักทอง

Which sounds like 

FukTong

Hahahaha, it's a great word for the English speaker.

Now, the Thai people love to use the pumpkin for curries, and desserts (dessert: "Ka-nohm wahn"). Pumpkin in coconut milk is a fantastic treat.
I have never worked with any form of pumpkin other than canned pumpkin, so imagine my concern when I realized that there is no such form in Thailand. But there is pumpkin and it is by no means expensive. Looks like it is time to be creative.
My first trial with pumpkin is in my recent blog post, when I made Roasted Pumpkin with walnuts and garlic. It was a complete success, the pumpkin, after being roasted, softens very nicely. I also made those scrumptious cinnamon streusel muffin tops (muffies). Looks like there is a glimmering possibility!
The only thing: I need to learn how to make pumpkin puree for the muffin batter. Time to utilize that ever-so-convenient form of stalking: the Internet. I used a recipe from the How Sweet It Is blog, but, instead of using a pie pumpkin, I used the Japanese pumpkin, and cut it into chunks after cleaning and peeling it. Then I roasted it for about 40 minutes. and put it in the blender, adding some nutmeg(1.5 tsp), brown sugar(1tbsp), cinnamon (2tsp), and sage (3 tsp.) to it. This was my result:

It was a little bit sticky, and very dark, so I was a little bit worried, but it tasted quite good.
And this was the recipe I used for the Pumpkin Pie Muffin Tops, from Crazy for Crust's blog.

Of course, I couldn't help but add cinnamon Streusel to the top for some (refer to the same post I hyperlinked earlier, the recipe is there), and I decided to make some easy caramel, from condensed milk. (This recipe basically said to put a can of sweetened condensed milk into a crock pot filled with water on medium-high heat for ten hours.)
Result:

Final Result of pumpkin Muffies?
Massive pies of heaven.

On a final note: look what I found in Thailand!

If you guessed Gatorade, You are correct! Blue and yellow exist in Thailand (probably because they are the prettiest). Take, that/