Monday, October 22, 2007

Sweet potato pie

Sometimes my stubbornness horrifies even me. An idle thought of how nice it will be to be able to have the wherewithal to make a pie again somehow got translated into an obsession with baking a pumpkin pie NOW. (Pumpkin pie baking obsession is not entirely new. I had a baking compulsion for a month or so as I was finishing my dissertation.)

This was a bad idea--I'm coming down with a cold, flying to NYC early tomorrow, hardly unpacked (nor fully packed)--but that didn't stop me. I thought it would be nice to take pieces of pie on the long flight with me to munch on during those times that I get ravenous and the flight attendants are MIA. But then, the reality of Aussie life tried to intervene. Aussie stores don't seem to carry canned pumpkin or Crisco. Aussies eat pumpkin soup and carve pumpkins for Halloween, but they don't seem to make pumpkin pies (I remember seeing a can of pumpkin at some point here, since I think that was what triggered the whole anticipation of pie-making.) I scoured all of Glebe for pumpkin and Crisco, with an increasingly hysterical interior monologue running furiously about the cultural and culinary inferiority of Australians. A sane person would have given up.

But no. In about the 4th grocery story, I caught sight of a sweet potato. Sweet potatoes are sort of like pumpkins, thought my pea brain. The right color, sort of right texture. So I have now made a sweet potato pie with a butter-based crust, which is currently cooling on the counter.

I'll let you know how it is.

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