Naveenk asked: Our friend she, recently contacted us with an interesting story about her latest cooking creation. She’s annual Thanksgiving dinner must include apple, pumpkin, and pecan pies. Her husband insists on it even though she protests that only the apple pie typically gets eaten, and she tosses the bulk of the pumpkin and pecan pies into the trash after giving him a week to refuse any more desserts.
This year, she got inspired a week after Thanksgiving in her quest to avoid wasteful tossing of food into the trash bound for a landfill instead of for someone’s palate.
Beware: this is not an exact recipe. It’s a cooking style that relies on sound instincts on the cook’s part. Here’s what She did, but says you can modify at will and still get good results:
Since her pumpkin pie was made from canned pumpkin pretty much following the recipe on the label but substituting sweetened condensed milk instead of canned evaporated milk and baked in a graham cracker crust, she just dumped the three-fourths of the pie she had left into a mixing bowl and started stirring.
Then, she scraped the remaining two-thirds of the store-bought pecan pie from its too-thick crust and mixed that real good. Next step was to mix about a half cup of all-purpose flour with about a half cup of light brown sugar, then blend that into the pie mixture, after which she added about a quarter cup of honey, three-quarters cup of chocolate chips, about a half cup of coconut, and about a cup full of mixed dried fruit that included raisins, pineapples, cherries, and cranberries.
She dropped the mixture in “dollops” on a buttered clay baking dish and baked for about 12 minutes at 350 degrees, watching carefully for the edges and tops of the randomly shaped caakies to turn light brown. She cooled them slightly on a wire rack and test-tasted to her delight.
A hit! She says the same creative cooking technique could be applied to a leftover sweet potato pie with any variety of interesting ingredients including oatmeal, granola, and your favorite varieties of nuts (got some leftover from a holiday party you aren’t sure what to do with?). Or, spice it up a bit with fresh natural nutmeg seed.
As they come out of the oven, personalize them even more using that excess holiday candy. Press a chocolate kiss, a bite-size peanut butter cup, or a piece of candy corn into them. For simplicity, you might even just sprinkle on a little white powdered sugar. If you are feeling super creative, mix up a batch of frosting (or cheat by using the store-bought kind) and slap two caakies together.
She says she’s likely going to make pumpkin and pecan pies for Christmas and might even hide them after a couple of slices have been removed so she can make caakies for New Year’s with very little planning, shopping, and effort. Bet you could serve it with ice cream, but be sure you also offer your guests a fresh brewed cup of Thai coffee or tea or Tortuga gourmet coffee.
Laura
