Sweet potato pie

This pineapple is too old. It cannot be used so it was discarded 

:-(

I intended to resort to lemon and lemon zest but then I forgot at the critical moment so my pie lacks these acidic elements. Though it has a quart of orange juice, and that's very acidic.  But I spaced out adding actual oranges. 

Dried cherries and apricots. 

These dry elements are soaked in rum.

They turned out to be insufficient. Triple this amount was used. The rest not soaked in rum.

All this is cooked stovetop in about a quart of orange juice. Cinnamon and clove and brown sugar was added in increments until I felt satisfied. Also salt. Also white sugar. Also one stick of butter. 

This pie is very buttery. Butter in the filling and butter in the crust. No holding back. Oh, Baby, it's on!

And that's why we're all going to be fat.

Turns out the pecans comprise a single layer inside the pie. A full layer of pecans edge to edge. The remaining filling does not have pecans. They are not frozen with the remaining portion. 

Pie crust made like a farm lady does.

2 cups of flour, one stick of near-freezing butter. Cut into fourths lengthwise then cut into tiny chunks that were smashed between thumbs and index fingers into the flour, rapidly until all the butter is smashed. So the flakes are built in. 

These flakes are built up until the entire bowl of flour is embuttered fairly heavily. Originally 3/4 of the stick of butter then more and more until the whole stick was eventually used minus just a few small chunks. 

The ice-water added, over 1/2 a cup. Drizzled in increments until the mass pulls together just barely. It's always more water than recipes say. Apparently Denver is terribly dry and so is the flour. 

Vodka works very nicely for this because it evaporates more completely when baked. But I forgot about that when I added the water.

I needed more dough. Two cups of flour wasn't enough. I wanted thicker crust with extra for more generous decoration. I wanted so much extra that I could bake pie-crust cookies with the surplus As it turned out I used every molecule and had to cut corners and roll it too thin. There wasn't enough to provide a generous edge.

Baked at 425℉ for 40 minutes.

I smelled it cooking before the end so with ten minutes left it was darkening irregularly and I turned down the heat to moderate level. 

This project was fun.

I have two Glad storage containers of frozen sweet potato filling without pineapple or any acid element like lemon and without pecans. It tastes very good. I suppose the sweet potato chunks could be larger but I don't care about that.

Look how much I held back. I didn't add orange brandy. I didn't add any chiles. I didn't add apple. I didn't add oranges. I skipped pineapple. No nutmeg or allspice. No cardamom. I could have went crazy with dry fruit, figs and dates, but I kept it all conservative.