VD! Yay!

Yes, Happy Valentine’s Day.

I made Karen a sweet potato pie. Actually, I made Karen AND Jake a sweet potato pie, but since Jake didn’t like it, I guess I made it for me and Karen. I wasn’t going to eat more than a forkful but how could I resist Jake’s uneaten pie?

I found the recipe on Cooks.com. The pie light and fluffy, not heavy like a store-bought pumpkin pie. Maybe that’s why Jake disliked it so much. He’s used to leaden fillings and par-baked crusts. This crust was well baked, baby, cuz I nuked it!

Recipe below the fold.

Maple Sweet Potato Pie For The Lactase Impaired

CRUST

Before getting into the crust, I should mention that I do not boil my sweet potatoes. Also, I use those red ones — garnets? Not the pale ones they call yams. I wrap them in foil and bake them in a 425 oven for about an hour, until they’re soft. Then I scoop out the guts and I’m ready to make filling. Meanwhile, make the crust:

1 cup pecans
2 tbs sugar
1.25 cups all purpose flour
3/4 cup cold unsalted butter chopped into 1/2 inch chunks
1/2 tsp salt
foil and rice to weight down the crust during baking

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

Grind the pecans and sugar in a food processor and transfer to a bowl. Now process the flour, butter, and salt until mealy. Add to pecan mixture and mix together.

Add 3 tablespoons of cold water and stir until you have a dough. Don’t expect a dough ball. In fact, a pastry blender thingie would have worked really well, but I got fed up and put everything back into the food processor. Now it was mealier than ever, so I poured it all into my 9-inch pie plate and pressed out a crust.

Line crust with foil and fill foil with rice. Bake for 7 minutes, remove foil and rice, and bake 5 minutes longer. Then take a look at it and notice that it’s STILL not fully baked and your wife HATES HATES HATES half-baked crusts, I mean it incenses her so much you could even sprinkle ants on her pie and she couldn’t hate it more, so put that puppy back in the oven and bake it another five minutes. But then you look at it and oh are you joking? Like five minutes was going to do anything? But the edges are darkening, so you put some foil around the edges and let the center bake another fifteen minutes or so. Something like that. I wasn’t paying attention. Eventually, it all turned brown and crispy.

Let that puppy cool.

FILLING:

2.5 cups sweet potato puree (two good-sized garnets)
1 cup half and half (I used 3/4 cup whole milk Lactaid and 1/4 cup cream)
3 large eggs, beaten
3/4 cup pure maple syrup
1.5 teaspoons maple extract (I left this out and it was just fine without it)
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground ginger (whoops, I left that out, too!)
a few grinds from the nutmeg grinder (but I added that to the recipe. Maybe that made up for my ginger gaffe)
1/2 teaspoon salt

You’re supposed to whisk this together until smooth. I used an electric mixer.

Pour this into the crust. If, like me, you used a regular pie pan instead of a deep dish pie pan, your filling will be heaped a little high. That’s okay. Use a spatula to smooth things out as best as possible, pushing the filling to the edges of the crust.

Bake at 425 for 45 minutes or until just set in the middle. Cool on a rack.

You’re supposed to serve this drizzled with maple syrup and heaped with whipped cream, but it’s unnecessary. This is a light pie, not overly sweetened. In fact, if you’re used to the typical American dessert, this will seem unnaturally not-sweet. Eat it with vanilla ice cream if that bothers you . . . but since we’re lactose intolerant, ice cream is not an option.

D.