Not As Easy As Pie
I attempted to make my first pumpkin pie today. I have been doing most of the cooking at home for almost a year now, but I have not done much baking. My wife was out of town and asked me to make the pie. It did not seem that hard. Yesterday, I cut up the pumpkin and roasted it for an hour at 350 degrees. When they had cooled a bit, I scooped the flesh away from the rind and ran it through our small food processor. Since the food processor is so small, it took me about 10 batches to do all of the pumpkin. I ended up with about 12 cups of pureed pumpkin.
Today, I got out the pie recipe and the blender. I put pumpkin puree, heavy cream, milk, honey, eggs, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger into the blender. It seemed to be leaking out the bottom, so I blended quickly with intention of finishing before the leak got worse. When I attempted to unlock the pitcher from the base, the bottom of the pitcher where the blades attach fell out, and all of the pie filling mixture went with it.
I cleaned up the mess with my daughter's help. I threw out the blender. The pitcher had cracked which caused the leak and also meant that the bottom was not held in properly. I headed off to the store and bought a new blender. I also had to buy more ginger, eggs, and heavy cream since I used the last of those ingredients for the last batch.
When I got home, I assembled the new blender which has a glass pitcher rather than plastic. I put in the ingredients and tried it out. It worked great. I poured the filling into two graham cracker pie crusts, and baked for an hour. They looked great, but I realized that in my haste to get the pies into the oven, I had forgotten the honey in this batch.
I much prefer apple pie over pumpkin pie, so I had my wife taste the pie to see how bad it was. Apparently, it was edible. I let my wife make the apple pie. There is no need to take chances with my Thanksgiving apple pie.