Two Tries at Sweet Potato Pie 

In preparation for Thanksgiving dinner, I decided that I a) wanted to try cooking again, and b) wanted to try this recipe in particular.

For one of the few times in my life, I knew that I needed to do a trial run. There was enough that could go wrong that if I relied on doing this right the first time, I would likely be left with a pie full of messy badness. And, I was mostly right. Here are things I learned from Attempt #1 at Sweet Potato Pie:

• If you have a steamer, it should probably have feet.
• If you don't have steamer feet, using binder clips is not a good replacement.
• If you don't have a potato masher, an ice cream scoop is not a good replacement.
• If you can't mash your potatoes by hand, neither a blender nor a hand mixer will likely get it done.
• If you have chunks of potato left, your batter will probably be too thin.

Needless to say, the first attempt led to a thin batter with chunks of sweet potato in it. It overflowed the pie crust. It ended up looking like this:

It tasted ok, if you could get past the "eating whole chunks of sweet potato in your pie" thing.

For Attempt #2, I got a new steamer and a potato masher. Mashing the sweet potatoes into a nice paste made the batter much thicker, with no chunks. That lead to a pie that looked like this:

After cooking and eating it, I'm calling it a success. Actually, I might go have some now.