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?

A Delicious Flavor Combination, A Book Review, Some Thoughts on Blogging and Fiction

Happy Thursday! Whereas yesterday, I could work outside some of the time because the sun was so gorgeous, today it's overcast and gloomy. I'm so glad that people enjoyed the bean-harvesting post. It's really amazing how much work there always is to do on a farm.

I have a grab-bag of different things to share today.

First, something delicious that I connected with since having to swear off tomatoes:

You can't see it very well (it's really a better shot of my knees, lol) but in the tub is kraut, cucumbers, avocado and some nutritional yeast. With romaine lettuce and my favorite jicama on the side. 

I had the same for dinner, but kicked up a notch with the addition of spirulina. I've never been that great a fan of cucumber, but there's something about cucumber chopped up with avocado and lots of spirulina that just hits the delicious spot. I urge you to try it: if you're not a spirulina fan, it might work for you just like it works for this not-cucumber fan!

Next up: a Book Review:

I just finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of the Cholera. I read it when I was in the bathroom, when I was getting my pills together for the day, when I was picking through filberts, getting dressed, brushing my teeth - and sometimes, just laying in bed before going to sleep! That's how I get books read.

This is a 346-page evocation of a time and place that is so foreign to me - the Caribbean coast of South America at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Marquez evokes so many characters, including many 'bit parts,' with such intimacy and detail, but never even names the city in which the story is set, presuming on the readers' knowledge, or showing that the precise location doesn't really matter, both. I believe it's set in Colombia, but I don't know the city. Many historic innovations are also canvassed - typing, the telegraph, hot air balloons, mailboxes - so that the story is an interesting piece of history at the same time.

It's a slow start, and often ponderously paced, but the development is so inexorably and carefully exposed that the result is fascinating. Reading it as a writer, it is fascinating to see the devices he employs. He uses the 'omniscient narrator's' perspective a lot more than most people do nowadays. He does amazing things with time and the timeline of the story. He focuses in with touchingly intimate, minute details on characters who are not obviously important for the story. For example, the book opens on the scene of the suicide of an otherwise insignificant character that takes place at a very late point in the storyline. The 'main characters' are not even encountered, certainly not in any way that would mark them as the main characters, until the end of the first chapter - and the chapters are long. 

This distancing from the main characters and focusing on others really places them in a strong and vivid setting, while the leaping around in the timeline help to build all kinds of anticipation and reflection. The other thing that this does is to underline the aptness of the title itself. The story is really all about 'love,' in its many forms and guises, at this specific time.

It's not a 'put your brain to sleep and ride along' read by any means: you have to do the work with it. And parts of it are not at all uplifting - to the contrary, in fact. But it is extremely well-written and worthwhile. I read it in the version I linked to above: it is clearly a good translation, because I was very seldom bothered by infelicities of translation. There were a very few times where the gender of a pronoun was clearly mistranslated, and a couple of superfluous definite articles, but otherwise, for a 'foreign language book,' it was quite a smooth read.

Some Thoughts on Blogging and Fiction

Having just finished reading a work of fiction, I found myself musing on the value of fiction as a way to experience the world. I have a lot of sympathy with those who say that they get to know more about the world and how they view the world from reading fiction than they do from reading the news or history. That's one of the reasons why I so admire good fiction: in the intimate, private setting in which you find yourself as the reader of a novel, you can try out all sorts of theories and ways to look at the world, and experience empathy or antipathy for all kinds of characters without having to act on it in the 'real world,' and so you have the test-ground to draw some important conclusions.

Phil, who worked as a librarian for years, has a t-shirt that says "Some of my best friends are fictional!"

And then I got to wondering: are friendships that are formed in the blogging world similar to our friendships with fictional characters? How similar is the world of blogging to the world of fiction? For sure, it's more interactive, or can be. And sometimes, you have a blogger meetup or win a giveaway, and a whiff of fairyland wafts into your 'real world.' But otherwise, through reading other people's blogs, you get to eavesdrop on their lives. You get to admire them, envy them, perhaps get your buttons pushed by them - wish you were or were not more like them... You get to identify or disidentify with them in many of the same ways that you do with fictional characters, i.e. without the pressure of immediate, instantaneous interaction. You can turn off the computer and walk away, or shut the book!

Perhaps it's also important that there's no way (short of the meetup context) to verify the truth about the character whose blog you are reading. We put up photos, we aim to be as transparent as we can be (or at least, I do, and I trust that people whose blogs I'm reading do too). So I'm not talking about the scenario where someone's posting a blog pretending to be something quite other than what they are. What I mean is that inevitably, we construct our own image of the person we're reading about and identifying with. And sometimes, they make it as easy for us as they can, with photos galore, and we can still end up with our internal version of the person that will only have a tangential connection to how that person perceives herself. 

I think the truth is, all relationships are like that. Some of my closest friends in real life are also fictional: my take on them is only the partial truth. I feel that it's one of the blessings of my relationship with Phil that we often touch base on just this subject and try to make sure that we are seeing each other aright.

So, perhaps it's not just blogging relationships that are like relationships with fictional characters. What do you think? Yes, I'm waxing philosophical... But I'd love to hear your thoughts!