Vegan Pumpkin Pie

A deliciously healthy recipe...

Photo and recipe via Care2.

CRUST


2 1/4 cups pecans, soaked overnight and dehydrated for 24 hours

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1 tablespoon coconut oil

1 tablespoon date paste

1 pinch sea salt

1. Place prepared pecans in food processor; pulse into small crumbs. Mix pecans and all remaining ingredients together well by hand.

2. Press into plastic (or parchment) lined 9-inch tart pan to desired thickness. Dehydrate 48 hours.

3. Chill crust in freezer for 15-30 minutes before filling. If not using all of hte crsut mixture, store extra in a container in the freezer.

FILLING

1/2 cup cashews, soaked

1/2 cup maple syrup

1/4 cup agave (read about agave)

1/2 cup coconut oil

1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons carrot juice

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 vanilla bean, scraped

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 1/2 teaspoons nutmeg

1. Blend all ingredients in Vita-Mix (or a basic heavy duty blender) until very smooth.

2. Fill tart crust and chill in freezer overnight. Remove pie from tart pan, cut into 12 even slices and serve, or wrap each slice in parchment and store in refrigerator.

The Dehydrator. When I first started considering a raw diet, all this talk of a dehydrator made me very nervous. I imagined some very high-tech piece of kitchen lab equipment that was probably very expensive, certainly complicated, and maybe even dangerous! Lo and behold–it’s a simple box with drying trays and a small fan and heater. I got one and use it all the time for a million things, even though I’m not exclusively raw. Anyway, you can live without it. If you are in a cooler climate, Matthew Kenney recommends using an oven at the lowest setting with its door propped open, or if oyu are in a warmer environ, he suggests laying your food in the sun. Again, you can also skip the drying of the crust and make the pie filling as a pudding.

Adapted from the great raw cookbook Everyday Raw (Gibbs Smith, 2008) by Matthew Kenney

And about that picture. It is an actual picture of the recipe, from the cookbook, but the recipe doesn’t explain the grid decoration (or how someone could possibly have such a steady hand with a pastry bag!). It looks to me like they reserved some of the filling mix, maybe mixed it with a little extra coconut oil (or maybe not) and piped it on.