{"id":2723,"date":"2012-11-10T14:46:30","date_gmt":"2012-11-10T14:46:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/?p=2723"},"modified":"2012-11-10T14:46:30","modified_gmt":"2012-11-10T14:46:30","slug":"for-thanksgiving-the-omg-i-cant-get-any-pumpkin-pie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/2012\/11\/10\/for-thanksgiving-the-omg-i-cant-get-any-pumpkin-pie\/","title":{"rendered":"For Thanksgiving: The OMG I Can't Get Any Pumpkin Pie"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Normally I try to keep\u00a0 food postings more or less over at EuropeanCuisines.com,<\/a> the part of the household where most of the cooking craziness in the household manifests itself. But I thought I’d copy it over at this side of things to make it available for those who might not normally visit cooking sites.<\/p>\n

Those of us who routinely spend Thanksgiving off the North American continent but still try to lay out a traditional Thanksgiving dinner probably all have our own stories about being unable to get some vital missing ingredient, and then being forced to make do with something less than optimal…<\/p>\n

One item that sometimes turns out to be very<\/em> hard to lay hands on is pumpkin.<\/p>\n

The difficulty usually surrounds canned pumpkin rather than the fresh kind… but even that can be a problem when it’s out of season. Markets in France and Germany for example, routinely feature some of the best fresh pumpkin to be found anywhere on the planet — firm, meaty, relatively seedless, and (most important) flavorful. But then these are varieties that have been bred for the table for centuries — not the North American varieties that are mostly bred for size so that they’ll make good jack-o-lanterns at Halloween. Problem is, once they’re out of season, you won’t see them again until the next year… and when you go looking for canned pumpkin, the response is usually bemusement. You won’t find it in most parts of Europe. If you can<\/em> track it down, it’s usually in some overpriced store that caters to foreigners and is going to make you pay five or ten times more for it than you would have in a supermarket in the States or Canada.<\/p>\n

At such times — if you’re not willing to buckle under — you learn to improvise. This recipe is one of EuroCuisineLady’s takes on the theme. It’s an adaptation of the basic pumpkin pie recipe in The Joy of Cooking<\/em>. This pie — using butternut squash and yams to replace the pumpkin — produces a rich, dense pie that compares very favorably with the traditional pumpkin version. It’s not going to taste exactly<\/em> like it… but for the moment it’ll do.<\/p>\n

(For a variant on this theme using only sweet potatoes, check out our Virtually Pumpkin Pie.<\/strong><\/a>)<\/p>\n

Ingredients:<\/em><\/p>\n