I Don't Follow Recipes, Either

I have a respiratory allergy to milk, so after I volunteered to make a pumpkin pie for the Thanksgiving dinner for nine happening at my house, I wanted to come up with one that I could eat.

Desserts challenge me and my system, whether I make them or have them at a restaurant. Fortunately, I don't feel I must have dessert on any regular basis. I do like a good pie, though, especially pumpkin.

When I was in college in the late 70s (I've been in college more than once) I got on a pumpkin-pie-making jag for several months. I sometimes made two or three a week. I haven't made one for years, though. Plus right now I'm somewhere where I can't buy the kind of shortening I'd actually eat.

I found this recipe for a graham cracker crust. In my version the yogurt became lemon soy yogurt, the graham crackers had ginger in them, and the cocoa powder went away. It needed ten minutes of baking.

Then I looked at ratios of ingredients for the filling in a few recipes to decide on my own. In place of the milk I added an extra egg and used maple syrup for much of the sweetener for flavor and moisture. I used cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and cloves as I like my pumpkin pie spicy.

As you can see, I got a pretty good result, despite a bit of extra browning on the crust edges.

I also finished one sleeve of my top-down Mountain Colors cardigan after everyone else went to bed last night. I'd done some knitting during the evening, so I only needed about an hour of quiet knitting and blog reading to complete it.

Today, before all the guests took off, I showed one of my SILs an on-line source for the Jaeger yarn in my Biscuit cardigan and showed her how to knit back backwards.

She was knitting a turquoise Drops yarn she bought on a business trip to Sweden into a cardigan from an old Bernat pattern she'd seen in a magazine years ago and then tracked down on Ebay.

After everyone left, we gathered up stray glasses and straightened cushions, I washed guest sheets and towels and remade beds, and DH vacuumed floors and carpets. We have more cleaning to do but the place feels back to normal. I enjoy the arrival and I enjoy the leaving of guests.

This afternoon I made a dent in my backlog of blog posts to read and determined that my target number of stitches at the top of the semi-drop-shouldered sleeves on the Biscuit cardigan will match the size of the armholes on the already knit fronts and back.

A good family visit, a successful recipe invention, and a couple of knitting progress points achieved make for a very nice holiday.

Comments

[Karen B.]

Well done, on both the pie and the sweater!