Avocado Pie: Raw, Low-Sugar, Vegan

It's Monday, so it should be a "Fifty First Weeks" post again. That little theme fell by the wayside during April, as so many of my series seem to. What is this a "first week" of? On the down side, it feels like first week of "crash." But it could also be first week of preparing bucket list for life after semester. Here we go a-grading...


As promised yesterday, here is the Avocado Pie recipe, rawified and created without reliance on a high-powered blender, and with an attempt to give options that don't depend too much on hard-to-find ingredients. I also promised some thoughts soon about increasing calories: in this post, there will be many examples of how to reduce calories while keeping nutrient levels high. I'll start with the original recipe, then explain what I did, step-by-step, and finally give a summary of the whole thing (below the picture of Leslie).

Here's Lynn's original recipe for Avocado Pie:

Crust:
1 1/2 cups finely chopped pecans
1/2 cup shredded dried coconut (sweetened or not)
1/4 cup melted butter
Mix with fingers and press into (9in) pie pan. Bake at 375 until edges are slightly brown. Cool.


Filling:
2 large ripe avocados
2 cans sweetened condensed milk
Juice of 2 lemons
Mix in Cuisinart until smooth. Pour into (cooled) crust. Freeze.


Topping:
Whip 1 cup whipping cream and flavor with vanilla. Spread on top of filling and sprinkle with grated pecans. Freeze until firm.

What I needed to do to adapt this

Since this pie has an unbaked filling and a nut-based crust, it was quite straightforward to "rawify." Most raw pie crusts are nut-based anyway. For this particular occasion, I chose to bake the crust lightly, to preserve that browned look. I used the same proportions of pecans and shredded coconut, but used palm shortening instead of butter. Coconut oil or coconut butter would have worked fine too. 

To make the crust completely raw: Simply don't put it in the oven and leave raw! Or, if you want that toasted flavor, put it in a dehydrator on 115 for several hours; in your oven at its lowest temperature if you don't have a dehydrator. One more tip: if you want that toasted flavor without toasting it, add a little good quality salt to the crust mix.

Most raw pie fillings are based on a combination of soaked cashews, almond milk, coconut oil, sweetener (often agave nectar (which I will never use)), lecithin, and fruits or other flavorings. I will give directions for a cashew-based adaptation of this pie as well, but hey, avocados are plenty calorie dense all by themselves! I wanted to make a filling that was less calorie dense than pureed avocado, not more so! Therefore, I used irish moss and unsweetened almond milk to make a raw, vegan version of sweetened condensed milk. I used low-and no-glycemic sweeteners, since an avocado-based pie would be ideal for those avoiding sugar. 

Avocados are wonderfully nutrient dense, but if they're combined with a whole bunch of nuts, coconut oil and sugars, even if said nuts, coconut oil and sugars are nutrient dense in their own right, I feel you end up with too many calories per bite and are more likely to feel uncomfortable after enjoying. So I think it's a blessing that I can make a delicious pie filling based on avocado without having to add a whole lot of extra fat and sugar calories to make it delicious.

I'm so impressed: my immersion blender was capable of making irish moss gel too! I kind of suspected that was a Vita-mix task. I did chop the soaked irish moss up before blending, to help it out.

Sub-recipe: raw vegan sweetened condensed milk  (low-fat, low sugar, with substitution options)

1 cup unsweetened almond milk (if you use homemade, it'll likely be creamier and higher-fat)(here are some homemade nut milk recipes)

1/3 cup prepared irish moss gel (see below)

1/4 cup erythritol

1/4 cup coconut sugar (gives it that yellowish sweetened condensed milk color)

1 tablespoon lecithin

1 teaspoon xanthan gum

1/2 teapoon white stevia powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Blend all together until smooth

To make the irish moss gel, soak a handful of irish moss seaweed in several changes of water until the seaweed expands in size and the water thickens up a little.

Roughly chop the moss, and blend it with as little of the soak water as possible, adding a quarter teaspoon of vanilla powder and a third cup of erythritol.

Here's how it looks:

Note: if you don't need it sugar free, use agave nectar, coconut nectar, maple syrup, raw honey, evaporated cane juice, or whatever sweetener you prefer instead of the erythritol. On the other hand, if you want the "sweetened condensed milk" completely sugar free, omit the coconut sugar and use more erythritol or stevia, or yacon syrup, to taste.

Here's the "sweetened condensed milk"--a nice, thick texture as you'd need for a pie filling, with no extra fat from cashews or coconut oil!

If you want a fattier version, instead of the irish moss gel, blend the almond milk with a third cup soaked cashews (or a quarter cup cashew butter) and two tablespoons coconut oil.

If you want a lower fat version but don't have irish moss, you could either double the amount of xanthan gum, or use two tablespoons ground psyllium husks (probably not the best option), or you could gently heat the almond milk and blend in a tablespoon of agar powder, which should thicken it similarly to the irish moss.

With the sweetened condensed milk substitute all made, blending in two avocados and the juice of two lemons was easy raw synergy!

I had to use a saucepan to blend all the filling--the beaker in which I made the sweetened condensed milk substitute was too small!


I poured the filling into the cooled, aromatic crust, and put it in the freezer for a couple hours.


Meanwhile, I pulled out of the freezer some leftover "lemon cashew cream cheese" frosting from our anniversary cake (the recipe is about two-thirds down the page), and just before we left for the party, I decorated the pie with the frosting.


My decoration skills weren't great, and with the sun shining in my photography skills were worse, but hopefully you get the idea.

I was a little concerned about showing up to the party with an unasked-for dessert, but as it turned out, the party was missing a dessert to be Leslie's birthday cake, so everything worked out perfectly! I love it when that happens.

So, in Summary--Avocado Pie Another Way!

Crust:

1 1/2 cup pecans, finely chopped

1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1/4 cup palm shortening (or coconut oil, or coconut butter)

1/2 teaspoon good quality salt

1 tablespoon water if necessary

Mix all together with fingers; press into a 9-in pie pan. Bake at 375 for 20 mins, or dehydrate for several hours, or leave as is.

Set aside to chill.

Filling:

2 ripe avocados

Juice of two lemons

1 1/2 cups homemade raw sweetened condensed milk:

Raw sweetened condensed milk:

1 cup almond milk

1/3 cup irish moss gel (made with vanilla and erythritol)

1/4 cup erythritol

1/4 cup coconut sugar

1 tablespoon lecithin

1 teaspoon xanthan gum

1/2 teaspoon white stevia powder

1/2 teaspoon good quality salt

Blend all together until smooth. Pour into cooled pie crust. Freeze until firm.

Raw Whipped Topping: Recipe is here.

You could either cover the whole pie with the topping, or blob it on as I did (I'm sure anyone else could do that more elegantly!) --I think it's nice to have some of that beautiful green showing.

Please let me know if anything isn't clear--there were a lot of steps in that process and lots of thoughts along the way, but the outcome is really quite simple!

Nutrient density and caloric density in desserts--your thoughts?

Garden Planning and Other Looking Ahead

I'm back home, Phil is back, and here I am! I missed blogging the last two days. In some ways, the daily post, the accountability, was helping me do better.

The last couple days have been backsliding, stressful, intense. Per my last post, I don't yet have full clarity on how much I should share here. So, per my strategy at other times like this, I'll focus on something else until I do have space and clarity. Coming up, I'll have a post on protein powders, as I've been promising for ages. I'll also talk about how to increase calories. All my kuntzim are specially directed toward reducing calories, so it might be interesting to apply some smarts to the reverse process. Just as a mirror never gives an exact image, so increasing is never the exact reverse of decreasing; so it's not a no-brainer by any means.

Garden Planning

Around this time every year, when the snow has gone away and green shoots forth thicker every day, we look around our place, take stock, start to think about our garden. Every year, Phil ponders the cost-benefit and wonders whether it's even worthwhile to do a garden, and every year we decide to do at least something. We have serious weed problems. For all the hundreds of thousands of hemp nettles we pulled last year, they are sprouting up everywhere in even greater profusion; ditto the cow parsnip (donor of blistering rashes). The paleocene horsetails are stubbornly ubiquitous--cut them out in one place and they'll spread thirty feet underground over the course of a year to pop up there. The snowshoe hare population still hasn't crashed, and they will gladly eat whatever we put out there. Later in the summer, the slugs clean up. Last year, redback voles ate all our peas from the ground up.

When there was still snow on the ground, Phil planted some carrots and spinach under an old skylight right on the edge of the bluff where it's warmest.

Under the skylight, it's a lush growth. There are some spinach and carrot greens visible in there, but mostly weeds are thriving in the steam room!


Here's a clump of horsetails, with hemp nettles coming up around them.

I took this picture of the view from one of our big garden plots last year up to the bunker as a snapshot of a rather unique time when you can walk clear up to the bunker unimpeded. Within a month, the nettles, fireweed, cow parsnip and other growth will be waist-high.

Here's some dock (with my boot beside it) coming up small but true.

While we were walking around, mama moose went on by, not very impressed that we were so close to her route, but unruffled.

It struck me that this two-acre piece we were walking, lamenting the depredations of bunnies, slugs, noxious weeds, was just a tiny puzzle-piece of the moose's beat, and is only a separate place with its peculiar weed problems in our own minds.

This is yet another push-and-pull point. After all our efforts hand-weeding for several years, Phil has decided to Round-up the worst weeds. I've vetoed that idea the last several years in a row; this time, he hasn't offered me the veto. Phil and I have such different philosophies around so many aspects of interacting with the earth. Phil also was raised on a farm and is much more actively engaged with the dirt on a daily basis than I am. Especially in the winter, I get stuck indoors with work projects and feel disconnected. Sometimes I fear my stipulations against herbicides and other interferences are just a kind of ignorance, and that I don't earn the right to a strong opinion because I don't put in as much work on the place. However, I've read recent literature suggesting that Round-up does not degrade/turn into water as quickly as it was originally claimed to and as Phil believes it does. At least I'm not raising bees this year.

I'm looking forward to raising herbs, but we have some pretty good ones that volunteer. This is wormwood (artemisia)--not the kind used for making absinthe, but a good cleanser, and so pretty! Nettles are in my future today as well.

That rainbow hat I got in Anchorage? Here's a picture of it on my head. It really could have been made for me.

My friend Lynn gave me an avocado pie recipe to rawify--I'm going to go see if I can do that, and will share the results. Another friend also gave grist to my mill for considering incorporating avocados into my diet again--I've been avoiding them for several months or more for a whole raft of reasons that mostly boil down to calorie avoidance and expenditure avoidance.

At least I'm thinking about doing something different! 

I'll have that to share soon. Would love your favorite avocado suggestions too!

Happy Cinco de Mayo and have a great weekend!