Laughing Matters: The One About Sweet Potato Pie

By Ryan G. Van Cleave |  Illustrations by Darcy Kelly-Laviolette

In an effort to improve myself in some tangible way thanks to all this COVID-related stay-at-home time, I signed up for The Science of Gastronomy course at Coursera, which I originally thought was a semi-serious exploration into the ever-amusing world of farts. Imagine my surprise, though, when I showed up for the first day of lessons, whoopie cushion in one hand, a farting phone app in the other, and the teacher starts in with how, after taking this course, “you may be able to create your own recipe, invent a new dish, and maybe one day you will open your own restaurant.”

He was totally talking food versus farts, I came to understand.

Whoops!

I figured I was a farting professional already, so maybe this faux food fart pas was a blessing in disguise. In terms of practical outcomes, getting better at cooking did seem a potentially more useful way to spend my time than doubling down on an already-there skill. 

Plus, man does not live on charred toast alone.

So, I signed up for more courses and got hold of cookbooks and recipes of all types. The one that really grabbed me was Trisha Yearwood’s “Sweet Potato Pie” recipe which I found at www.FoodNetwork.com. Honestly, I was equally taken by William Shattner’s Cappuccino Muffins and Jessica Alba’s Turkey Meatballs, but the picture of Yearwood’s pie looked mouth-wateringly delicious—so, so yummy. And with 50 5-star reviews and the difficulty level marked “easy,” I figured there’s pretty much no way in the world that this could go wrong, right?

Things began to go wrong when I couldn’t find eggs. My older daughter made her signature sandwich scramblers for lunch, thus the few remaining eggs we had in the house were goners. Oh well. I could adjust. Nowhere in the recipe did it say you had to gather all the requisite ingredients first. I figured if that was important, the recipe would include such a disclaimer. The more I thought about it, the more this recipe—any recipe, really—seemed like suggestions versus hard-and-fast rules. 

So, I Googled what to do when your daughter used up all the eggs, and I learned that I could swap in baking soda with vinegar (didn’t have), aquafaba (didn’t know what that was), or pureed fruit, so I dumped half a can of crushed pineapple into the mixing bowl along with ¾ cup sugar, ¼ cup milk, and a pinch of salt. Next up was roasted, peeled, pureed sweet potatoes. 

Let’s not talk about the potatoes. Nor the homemade 9-inch pie shell. Mistakes were made.

Note to self: figure out what the @#$!&% it means to “puree.”

Note to self: vanilla extract is NOT the same as vanilla vodka.

Note to self: use an electric mixer versus wielding a wooden spoon really, really, really fast.

Note to self: make an appointment with my chiropractor.

The good news is that my sweet potato pie fiasco claimed no casualties, which is more than I can say for my duckless Duck Pâté en Croûte. The latter dish sounded easy to make when I was just reading about it on the page. The reality of making it was far more challenging. Be warned.

Note to wife: I’ll bleach the trash bin next week—I’m 97% confident the smell will come out.

The good news is that I did learn to create an edible new dish. Thanks to a video I watched on Gordon Ramsay’s YouTube channel that he shot in South Africa, I can now make a 10-minute spicy cheeseburger with dry rub spices on a piece of fencing over an open-pit fire on the edge of a jungle. The secret, as revealed by my cooking buddy Gordie, is that after you work on the dry rub, you slather enough butter onto the meat patties so it caramelizes before you get attacked by an angry hippo.

It turns out that hippo threats are optional, though, quite frankly, I thought that was the most interesting part of the process, at least from the prospective of me watching the cooking video from the comfort of my own Sarasota home.

Add my burger-making skills to the food-making abilities I retained from my college years—making grilled cheese with an iron and wax paper, and boiling hot dogs in the Mr. Coffee pot—and I’m confident I will survive if my wife and kids do take that COVID-delayed trip to see out-of-state relatives. Of course, I could just hit up Taco Bell for every meal while they’re gone, but that seems a far dicier—dare I say noisier—proposition.

I encourage you to make the most of any bonus at-home time, too. Baby Yoda’s cute and all, but you can only watch The Mandalorian so many times before you realize, “Hey…I could just as easily be trying out a recipe for Kool-Aid pickles, chocolate salami, or ham and bananas hollandaise.”

Just think of the sheer delight you can bring to a holiday party with ideas such as those!

If you’re into self-improvement and cooking as much as I am, go ahead and send me your success stories at chefryan@scenesarasota.com. And if you happen to know what makes a sweet potato sweet, why there isn’t such a thing as a sour potato, and whoever invented the idea of pureeing, please drop me a line. Inquiring culinary minds want to know.