Have I Told You the One About Pie...

... Pumpkin Pie made from Halloween pumpkins?  Have I told you that story?  I've told all my stories many times and yet, each time I post something, someone in my immediate family says, "I've never heard that story before!"

Well, back in the days of what I call my Molly Mormon, sweet-young-thing period, I was convinced that in order to belong to the flock and earn my Suzy Homemaker Award, it was necessary to know how to do a little bit of everything and make everything from scratch.  It was okay to purchase pumpkins for Halloween decorating if I hadn't grown my own but a real crime to just toss them once the harvest celebrations were over.  So I baked the pumpkins and made pie with the pulp.

My husband and I and our two kids moved ourselves and our meager belongings from Salt Lake City to Sparks, NV in early fall, 1976.  Arrangements had been made for help to move into a house but the house wasn't available on the day we finally drove off the desert and back into civilization so the plan to have help fell through.  After days of being cooped up in a tiny room at the Holiday Inn, our stuff in a U-Haul in the Inn's parking lot, Frank and I finally got the go-ahead and began moving our rag-tag belongings into the house, ourselves.  Neighbors across the street must have been curious, watching us and came to offer help carrying in such things as bolts of cloth, big commercial-sized canisters of staples like sugar and flour and chocolate chips, quart bottles of home-canned stuff.

When we finished, I asked them to join us for pie in a few days when we got settled a bit.  Liz and Dick came.  My pumpkin pies looked fabulous.  She asked how I made them.  When I explained that I had baked pumpkins to use for the filling, she said she'd never heard of doing that, while exchanging looks with her husband, as though to confirm that indeed, they found us odd and hippie-like.  Frank did have facial hair and longer locks and to satisfy their curiosity about some of the stuff they'd helped carry in that moving day, I'd told them I sewed my family's clothes, made bread routinely, and canned food for storage.  Liz and Dick.  Each of them took a big bite of pie.  There was silence.  I quickly took a bite.  The pie had NO SUGAR in it!

Now, when I serve pumpkin pie, and because I've told them this story, my family always asks, "Does the pie have sugar in it?"  Could this be why I always cut a sliver (sometimes a little bit more) of pie to taste the minute it comes out of the oven?  It could!

I love making pie, even and especially pumpkin pie in fall and winter months.  And I confess.  I left the sugar out one other time but making sugarless pumpkin pie is not a part of me, on a regular basis.