Sweet Potato Pasta and Sweet Potato Pie

I've been out of town for a while. And that means so much good food. Before I left I made lunch for a friend. Naturally it turns into a little bit of a story. I had visited the farmers market and bought a small basket of sweet potatoes, which I hadn't gotten around to eating. I decided I really needed to eat them before I left for a few weeks, but I wasn't interested in just baking them. So I surfed around for a little while and found a recipe for sweet potato and goat cheese pasta with sage brown butter.

Of course, I thought this was perfect because it has 5 ingredients and except for the goat chesse, I had all of them in my house.

Let me tell you some of the changes I made.

1. I used gluten-free penne pasta. I liked that a lot better than lasagna.

2. I mixed the sweet potatoes and goat cheese while the sweet potatoes were really still hot. I used my Kitchen Aid and they were really smooth and creamy.

3. I discovered that goat cheese tastes quite a bit like cream cheese, so when I made this for my family last week, I used half goat cheese and half cream cheese.

4. I added the sage to the brown butter after the butter was completely brown and slightly cool. This kept the sage from going crispy and I liked that better.

I did make this for my family and they really liked it as well (except for Kim who doesn't like sweet potatoes).

In all truth, I had so many sweet potatoes that I also decided to make the "Haitian Sweet Potato Bread." My thinking was that it would actually be a good snack to take on the airplane. Somehow with the description I thought that it would be bread, a nice sweet bread like muffins. Yeah, not at all.

My friend and I ate it and it was actually really good. It is sweet and creamy. But it is definitely not bread.

I decided to rename it "Crustless Sweet Potato Pie." Now I am from North Carolina and so I know that this is not at all like a sweet potato pie. But a pie filling is the closest thing I can think of to this.

Pumpkin, Pumpkin, Pumpkin

Round two of Pumpkin Muffin testing went much better. I have to give a shout out to Karina of Karina's Kitchen who has a wonderful post on substitutions. Her suggestions on sugar substitutions that gave me the ideas for these adjustments.

As I mentioned, I wanted some Thanksgiving-y (-ish?) treats, so my plan on Wednesday was to bake muffins and pumpkin pie. Yes, both gluten and sugar-free. Oh, and I didn't want to use agave nectar or honey. I guess I just need an adventure in my life.

I reasoned that since muffins can be dense, they would be sweetened very easily with raisins. The pumpkin pie, on the other hand, needed something lighter, so I used a banana. Both were delicious right out of the oven.

UPDATE: I shared them with a friend today, we both thought the pumpkin muffins were delish after we heated them up again (typical of gluten-free food). They really were quite good. And... we both agreed that the pumpkin pie needs another round of experimenting. The crustless-ness was a success, but ... the pie just wasn't that great. It was better warm and then we drizzled agave nectar over the top, and that made it pretty good. But still needs some more experimenting. Looks good though, right?


For the pumpkin pie, my recipe came from Shirley at Gluten-Free Easily. It is a Crustless Pumpkin Pie. What an ingenious invention, and super simple, all you have to do is add 1/4 cup flour to the pumpkin filling. I managed to follow Shirley's recipe exactly, except I replaced the sugar with 1 mashed small ripe banana. Now that I have looked back at Karina's sugar substitutions post, I could have pureed the banana to get rid of even the smallest clumps. A word of caution, you do want to use the ripest banana possible. Just peel your black bananas and toss them in the freezer and you'll always have some on hand.

I'll cover costs before giving you my own recipe. Canned pumpkin was on sale for 79 cents, I used two cans for these two dishes. Evaporated milk was $1.19, Allspice was $1.19, and Nutmeg was $1.19. Everything else I had sitting around. Total $5.51.


Pumpkin Muffins
Adapted from a community cookbook

1 2/3 cup GF flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp baking soda
2 eggs
1/2 cup melted butter
1 cup pumpkin
1/3 cup almond milk
1/3 cup raisins, blended fine

Mix dry ingredients.
Put the raisins and a splash of water in the blender. The water will help keep the raisins from being so sticky, and make them easier to scrape out. Blend them as finely as possible. Add all contents of blender into the wet mixture bowl.
In a separate bowl, mix eggs, pumpkin, butter, and milk.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet. Mix until moist and incorporated.
If the batter is too dry, add more almond milk.

Baked at 350 in greased muffin tins for 20 minutes.
Makes approximately 15 muffins.