{"id":3497,"date":"2009-02-14T22:10:51","date_gmt":"2009-02-15T06:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=3497"},"modified":"2009-02-14T22:13:02","modified_gmt":"2009-02-15T06:13:02","slug":"vd-yay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=3497","title":{"rendered":"VD! Yay!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, Happy Valentine&#8217;s Day. <\/p>\n<p>I made Karen a sweet potato pie. Actually, I made Karen AND Jake a sweet potato pie, but since Jake didn&#8217;t like it, I guess I made it for me and Karen. I wasn&#8217;t going to eat more than a forkful but how could I resist Jake&#8217;s uneaten pie?<\/p>\n<p>I found the recipe on Cooks.com. The pie light and fluffy, not heavy like a store-bought pumpkin pie. Maybe that&#8217;s why Jake disliked it so much. He&#8217;s used to leaden fillings and par-baked crusts. This crust was well baked, baby, cuz I nuked it!<\/p>\n<p>Recipe below the fold.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><strong>Maple Sweet Potato Pie For The Lactase Impaired<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>CRUST<\/p>\n<p>Before getting into the crust, I should mention that I do not boil my sweet potatoes. Also, I use those red ones &#8212; 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&#8217;re soft. Then I scoop out the guts and I&#8217;m ready to make filling. Meanwhile, make the crust: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>1 cup pecans<br \/>2 tbs sugar<br \/>1.25 cups all purpose flour<br \/>3\/4 cup cold unsalted butter chopped into 1\/2 inch chunks<br \/>1\/2 tsp salt<br \/>foil and rice to weight down the crust during baking<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Preheat oven to 425 degrees.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Add 3 tablespoons of cold water and stir until you have a dough. Don&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s STILL not fully baked and your wife HATES HATES HATES half-baked crusts, I mean it incenses her so much <em>you could even sprinkle ants on her pie<\/em> and she couldn&#8217;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 <em>oh are you joking? Like five minutes was going to do anything?<\/em> 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&#8217;t paying attention. Eventually, it all turned brown and crispy.<\/p>\n<p>Let that puppy cool.<\/p>\n<p>FILLING:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>2.5 cups  sweet potato puree (two good-sized garnets)<br \/>1 cup half and half (I used 3\/4 cup whole milk Lactaid and 1\/4 cup cream)<br \/>3 large eggs, beaten<br \/>3\/4 cup pure maple syrup<br \/>1.5 teaspoons maple extract (I left this out and it was just fine without it)<br \/>1 tsp cinnamon<br \/>1\/4 teaspoon ground cloves<br \/>1 teaspoon ground ginger (whoops, I left that out, too!)<br \/>a few grinds from the nutmeg grinder (but I added that to the recipe. Maybe that made up for my ginger gaffe)<br \/>1\/2 teaspoon salt<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You&#8217;re supposed to whisk this together until smooth. I used an electric mixer.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s okay. Use a spatula to smooth things out as best as possible, pushing the filling to the edges of the crust.<\/p>\n<p>Bake at 425 for 45 minutes or until just set in the middle. Cool on a rack.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re supposed to serve this drizzled with maple syrup and heaped with whipped cream, but it&#8217;s unnecessary. This is a light pie, not overly sweetened. In fact, if you&#8217;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&#8217;re lactose intolerant, ice cream is not an option.<\/p>\n<p>D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes, Happy Valentine&#8217;s Day. I made Karen a sweet potato pie. Actually, I made Karen AND Jake a sweet potato pie, but since Jake didn&#8217;t like it, I guess I made it for me and Karen. I wasn&#8217;t going to eat more than a forkful but how could I resist Jake&#8217;s uneaten pie? I found&hellip; <a class=\"continue\" href=\"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/?p=3497\">Continue Reading VD! Yay!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","radius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3497"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3499,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497\/revisions\/3499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ballsandwalnuts.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}