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Bento Recipe: Purple sweet potato pie

 
   
 

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Sweet potato pie made with Okinawa sweet potatoes, which are purple. Purple automatically equals cool.

Not a photo negative

Ingredients:

    2 cups of mashed Okinawa (purple) sweet potatoes
    1 stick of unsalted butter at room temperature (not melted!)
    1/4 cup of white sugar
    1/4 cup of honey
     2 room-temperature eggs
    1/2 cup of heavy cream
    1/2 cup of milk
    1 tsp of vanilla
    1/4 tsp of salt
    1 pie crust - from a box, premade, or from scratch, whatever works for you. Bottom only.

First, peel the potato and cut it into chunks about the size of a small egg. Boil the chunks until they turn soft, then drain and mash them until they're smooth.  If you don't have a mixing machine (and I don't) you can smush the potato chunks through a mesh strainer with the back of a spoon. It's a workout for the arms, but it gets the job done. However you do this, at the end you should have two cups of potato.

Preheat the oven to 325. In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugar together. If the butter is at room temperature, it'll easily be soft enough to mix up. Add the honey, mix it up, then add the eggs and mix some more. When that's smooth whip in the potatoes, Again, mix until smoothish. Finally, add the vanilla, salt, milk, and cream, and mix yet some more, until it's pretty smooth.

However you've made your pie crust, put it into your pie dish. Pour the mix gently in, then bake the pie for 45 minutes. Let the pie cool to room temperature.

Serve with whipped cream, or some other cream topping if you want to get fancy.

Variation: use small pastry shells, the ones that look like little tiny pie shells, to make miniature pies, perfect for packing in a bento box.. I made a half batch with some leftover potato, and it filled up 8 shells.