plonq | Pie

I picked up some yams when

atara and I were out shopping on Monday, with only vague notions of what I would do with them. Yesterday I cut one of them up into a lamb curry which is remarkably dense, but very good. Today I cooked up two more of them turned them into a couple of pies. While I would have prefered to make them with the white variety of sweet potato, the only kind I can ever find in the stores around here are the darker ones. I found an on-line recipe that looked good and, as usual, immediately made changes to it on the fly.

I replaced the two cups of white sugar with a cup of brown sugar and a cup of Splenda. I added about half again as much nutmeg as it called for, and then dumped in some powdered clove and cardamom for good measure. I used Splenda instead of sugar in the pie crust as well. I did a couple of other minor changes to the crust, and I have to say that this is the best crust I have turned out in awhile. The past three times I have made crusts, I used butter that was partially frozen. This time the butter was chilled, but not frozen. Once I had the crusts in the pie plates, I put them out on the back porch to chill for about five minutes while I straightened things out in the kitchen. For the first time in awhile I have crusts that are flakey rather than bullet proof. If I had known that they would turn out so well I would not have trimmed them so close to the tins.