After falling short, reassess, regroup and recreate — or try, try again.
Facebook told me a couple of weeks ago that it has been three years since I conceived the idea of writing a pie blog.
My idea, which Facebook recounted in detail, was to bake a pie and tell a story every week: “It would be all things pie. With stories. Stories about pie. And family and life and pets and politics and, you know, pie. I was thinking of doing, like, a post every week, but then I thought, holy cow, that’s a lot of pie.”
What Facebook didn’t say but what I thought was I would create a blog post once a week for a whole year — so 52 different posts, 52 different pies, 52 different stories — and after reaching that unwritten goal, if it wasn’t fun anymore or if I had run out of pie recipes (which kind of seems impossible), I would move on. If, on the other hand, after 52 weeks, I was still having fun and still thought I had something to say — or if, you know, representatives from Kerrygold or King Arthur’s Flour or, like, Grey Goose knocked on my kitchen door and begged me to let them advertise on my site — then I would keep going indefinitely, ad nauseam, forever and ever, amen.
But, here’s the thing: Life — and death — got in the way of the stories and the pies; and no one knocked on my door.
Simply put, I failed.
I’m not too proud to admit that.
I failed those unwritten goals. (Reporters used to tell me, as I sat twiddling my thumbs while I waited for their tardy copy, that deadlines were really just suggestions. I disagreed with them about that, of course, although I wasn’t really in a position to do anything about it, but maybe unwritten goals really are just recommendations — or prompts — or motivators. Maybe they’re just suggestions.) To date, three years in, there have been 44 posts. One of them was basically just holiday recipes, no story, and one of them recreated a dinner party for guests with different dietary demands, so there’s also been 48 recipes.
Almost 52 but not 52 and not 52 in 52 weeks.
So the original concept didn’t work out. I’m sorry about that but not necessarily disappointed. Falling short of a goal just forces us to reassess — the methods, the motivation, even the goals themselves — and then to regroup and recreate. As they sing-song on the playground: “… try, try again.”
As it was back in the days of trying to learn hopscotch or times tables, that’s easier said than done. In spite of that, however, it remains a worthy goal and I try to make that my code of the road. I hope everyone does.
Wasn’t it Rosa Parks who said, “We will fail only when we fail to try.”
So here’s a quick story about epic pie failure. Not simply failure, but chagrin and disappointment. Not just messing-it-up failure, but throw-away-the-whole-damn-pie failure.
Purple, it turns out, is the color of fiasco.
Ever hear of ube?
Ube is a variety of yam that has purple flesh and, when you cook with it, the dishes have vivid hues: lavender, violet, amethyst, deep royal aubergine.
In the weeks leading up to that Thanksgiving (2022), I was seeing all these references to ube on the cooking shows on Food Network. I was intrigued. I like purple. I mean, really, who doesn’t? But aside from, say blueberries or blackberries or grape Kool-Aid, I hadn’t really met purple on a plate. Curious, I found ube recipes online; then they found me. And even though most people in my family are painfully traditional when it comes to a holiday menu, I decided to make an ube pie for the big day. I scoured the grocery store shelves and found yams and sweet potatoes and pumpkins, but I failed to find anything approximating an ube.
That year, we topped off our Thanksgiving feast with a delicious, satisfying, but same-old same-old pumpkin pie.
This past holiday season, I heard less about ube and more about purple sweet potatoes. I’ve actually never had sweet potato pie. Like I said, my family is very traditional about the holidays, and our tradition has always been pumpkin. So I abandoned plans to hunt for ube again and decided to try this new, kind of exotic food. I easily found purple sweet potatoes in the weeks leading up to the holiday.
I picked what I thought was going to be the perfect recipe, one with cream cheese and a pecan crust. I actually weighed the potatoes to ensure there would be enough for the filling. I roasted the potatoes, letting the earthy aroma fill the kitchen. When they were cool and soft to the touch, I cut the potatoes open and was bowled over by the color, a deep, intense magenta, like someone had melted a pile of purple crayons in a potato skin.
Once the cream cheese, the eggs and the condensed milk were added to the purple sweet potatoes, the filling mellowed to a rich, luxurious lavender.
On Thanksgiving night, following a trip into the mountains and a big buffet dinner, a friend came over for pie. First thing in the door, she glanced at the table and said, “What’s that pretty purple pie?” With some pride and continued amazement, I told her everything I had learned about purple sweet potatoes. Then I churned up some whipped cream and poured some hot coffee, and we had pie.
One bite. Only one bite. Just one little bite and I knew something went terribly wrong. It was awful. And by awful, I mean, it tasted like sadness and bitter disappointment — or wet socks. There was no discernible flavor. There was a little tease of earthy tuber taste, but just the slightest hint, and certainly not the creamy sweet decadence I had promised those around the table. There was the slightest note of autumn spices, more aroma than flavor, but shamefully not enough to punctuate a holiday. There was no sweetness. None. The pecan crust was good and the whipped cream, of course, was delicious, but the in-between was pretty hard to swallow.
My guests gave it the old college try, attempting to say nice things and to take a second or third bite, just to be polite, because they’re that kind of people, which is, you know, sometimes nicer than they need to be.
My mother used to tell me never to make a new recipe for company. You should try it out on your family first, she said, because your family has to love you even if your cooking sucks. Maybe, if you really want to be safe, you should save the first attempt for yourself. But if you feel daring and choose to throw good sense to the wind, she insisted, have a back-up plan.
My back-up was pumpkin pie. Tangy, tawny and tauntingly traditional, it did not let us down.
For the next couple of days, I spent way too much time trying to figure out why my beautiful purple pie was so awful, and then it occurred to me that I might have inadvertently used evaporated milk instead of the sweetened condensed milk called for in the recipe. Oops! I don’t know that for sure since, by the time of my a-ha! moment, the can that could have proved the case was making its way to the landfill (or wherever they recycle cans).
This pie was a failure, but that‘s OK because I can try again, once the purple sweet potatoes return to the stores in the fall. Or I can try something else; I found a recipe that uses both purple and orange sweet potatoes to create a delightfully striped autumn pie. That sounds cool!
And as Nelson Mandela said: “I never lose. I either win or I learn.”
I did in fact learn: Follow the recipe; have a Plan B; and never underestimate your mother.
The PiE
Creamy Purple Sweet Potato Pie
with a pecan crust
Although the ube, or purple yam, has been known to humans since ancient times, I first heard of it only two or three years ago. I started hearing people on Food Network talk about it, mostly on the baking shows where they were using it both for flavor and color. It is native to the Philippines and surrounding areas and has expanded and naturalized in China, Africa, Madagascar and places throughout the Western Hemisphere.
An ube — also known as a ten-months yam, a winged yam, and a Guyana arrowroot — has an earthy, slightly nutty taste but is said to be sweeter with a moister texture than a sweet potato. Because of its heightened sweetness, it is a staple in Filipino desserts, giving its distinctive color to cakes, cheesecake, ice cream and donuts.
I heard about a Filipino restaurant in New York, the Manila Social Club in Brooklyn, that made an ube donut filled with champagne jelly and ube mousse, covered with icing made with Cristal champagne and dusted with 24k gold. They sold that donut for $100.
That's a fancy donut.
Enter the lowly sweet potato, also used in desserts and Thanksgiving treats and currently popular for french fries. There is also a fun purple variety of the sweet potato.
Like your average run-of-the-mill sweet potato, the purple variety is a tuber rich in fiber and other good stuff, like antioxidants, that was originally cultivated in Central and South America. It eventually made its way to Asia — the Philippines, China, then Japan — and became known as the Okinawa purple sweet potato. It made it to the United States when it hit Hawaiian soil and it is now sometimes known as a Hawaiian Sweet Potato.
About the same time, a friend gave a farmer in North Carolina a purple sweet potato. The farmer was already growing sweet potatoes on his Stokes County farm and, intrigued by the new cultivar’s color and slightly sweet, sort of floral taste, he began cultivating the purple tubers. He patented them as Stokes Purple Sweet Potatoes about 20 years ago. I found them under that name in several grocery stores in Fort Collins in the weeks before Thanksgiving.
Although this Creamy Purple Sweet Potato Pie was an abject failure when I made it, I am including the recipe here because I still believe in its promise. I’m pretty sure the failure was mine and not the recipe’s.
If you’re feeling adventurous (and can find the purple tubers), give it a try.
The recipe
Pecan Pie Crust
1¼ cup all-purpose flour
⅓ cup pecans
2 rounded tablespoons granulated sugar
¼ rounded teaspoon kosher salt
5 ounces cold unsalted butter, cubed
2-4 tablespoon cold water
Toast pecans in a skillet over medium heat for 3-5 minutes until brown and fragrant. Set aside to cool. Once cooled, grind toasted pecans into a fine meal.
Add flour, sugar and salt to the pecans and mix. Use a spatula to scrape the pecans off the side and bottom of the bowl.
Using a pastry cutter, cut in cubed cold butter to the flour mixture, until pea sized.
Drizzle cold water over the dough mixture and using a spatula, press the mixture together until all the ingredients form a ball.
Turn the dough out on a piece of plastic wrap and shape into a disk. Wrap well and rest in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
After the dough has rested, take the disk of pie dough out of the refrigerator, and on a well-floured surface, roll the dough into a circle about 2” larger than your pie dish. Carefully place the dough over the pie dish, lightly press the dough into the bottom and side of the pie dish, letting the excess dough hang over the side. Trim the excess; fold under and create a fluted edge.
Cover the pie dish with plastic wrap and freeze for 15 to 30 minutes.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
When the oven is heated, remove pie crust from the freezer and dock the bottom and sides of the pie dough with a fork. Cover with a sheet of parchment paper and fill with pie weights or dried beans.
Place the pie dish on a large baking sheet. Bake pie crust for 25 minutes with beans, then carefully remove the parchment paper along with the beans and bake for another 5 minutes.
Remove the pie crust from the oven and let it cool on a wire rack.
Sweet Potato Pie Filling
8-ounce cream cheese (microwave 30 seconds to soften)
1 can 14-ounce sweetened condensed milk
3 large eggs
15 ounces purple sweet potato (roasted and mashed)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon ginger
Begin with slightly more than 1 pound of raw purple sweet potatoes as they will cook down and you will discard the skins. Pierce the sweet potatoes with the tip of a paring knife and wrap them in foil. Place them next to the pie dish on the baking sheet or place them on a separate baking sheet.
Bake the sweet potatoes for 45 to 60 minutes until cooked through. (Sweet potatoes can be roasted at the same time as you are parbaking the crust.) Check the potatoes by piercing with a paring knife or fork in the thickest part of the potato. If the knife or fork goes through easily, the potatoes are done. Remove from the oven and let them cool on a wire rack.
Reduce the oven temperature to 350 degrees.
Once the sweet potatoes are cooled, peel them and mash them in a bowl with a potato masher or fork. If you want a smoother filling, press the mashed sweet potatoes through a fine sieve mesh.
In a larger bowl, whisk together softened cream cheese and sweetened condensed milk. Beat in the eggs until smooth. Add mashed sweet potato, vanilla and spices, and beat until smooth.
Pour filling into the crust. To prevent the edge of the crust from burning, cover with a pie shield or thin strips of foil.
Bake for 30-35 minutes until the middle is still slightly jiggly.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature. Refrigerate until the filling is completely set, preferably overnight, before slicing.
(Original recipe from wildwildwhisk.com, Trang Doan.)
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