If you saw the previous recipe, you’ll know that we still had half of a kuri squash already roasted. What does one do with that? Well, if you’re and have a bevy of visitors traipsing through the house (aka campaign central) all the time, a healthy-ish dessert to go with coffee sounded like a good idea.

I quickly browsed some recipes for pumpkin pie made from fresh pumpkin and really didn’t like the amount of sugar they called for, nor the other random ingredients (evaporated milk, several eggs). Also, I like a good pumpkin pie, but a lot of them have this weird congealed, gelatinous texture that I surmise comes from the eggs/evaporated milk. The crust I made from what I had in the pantry–a stack of graham crackers, some butter biscuits, and a little almond flour. So I set out on my own. “How bad could it turn out?”, I thought. And well it was GOOD. So good that today, two days later, it’s all gone. 

rustic, homemade

The ingredients

• 1/2 red kuri squash or any other squash/pumpkin (recommend sweeter varieties)
• 4 squares of graham crackers
• 5 small cookies (like the ones that come with espressos)–just use more graham crackers if that’s what you have
• 1/4 cup almond meal
• 4 T butter (crust)
• 2 t cinnamon
• 2 t all spice
• t 2 ginger
• 1 t cloves
• 1/4 cup of powdered milk
• 1/4 cup Turbinado sugar

The method

1. My squash was already cooked (if yours isn’t you can either bake it or microwave it until soft)
2. Preheat oven to 350
3. In a food processor or blender, break up the graham crackers and cookies into crumbs. my vitamix did this in about 15 seconds!
4. Add 1/4 cup almond meal to the crumbs
5. You can melt butter or do what I did–pour the crumbs into a pie plate lined with parchment and chop up softened butter and put it on top. Throw it into the oven til the butter melts and then mix it up.
6. Scoop out squash into blender container. Pulse until almost smooth–i left a few chunks for texture. Spoon out into a bowl.
7. Add in the spices, powdered milk, and a few spoons of sugar (add more to taste if you’d like, I used 2)
8. Pour the pumpkin mixture into the pan. Bake for 15-20 minutes at 350. I found mine was a little moister than I wanted, so I lowered the temperature to 250 and baked for another 15 minutes, which yielded the perfect texture. Keep checking on it at this stage…you don’t want dry or leathery…just firm enough to cut neat slices. Fancy, no. Tasty? yes.