Pumpkin Pie for US Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States.  To celebrate with my US readers, I thought I'd make a pumpkin pie, traditional Thanksgiving fare.  

There are  many, many different recipes for pumpkin pie.  I decided to make the recipe from the Hoosier Mama Book of Pie.  Hoosier Mama is a pie shop in Chicago, but a Hoosier is a resident of Indiana, the neighbouring state to Illinois.  This book has few photos but lots of pie recipes.  You can also find the recipe online here.

I had to adapt the recipe for a number of practical reasons.  First, canned pumpkin puree is not a thing in Australia; nor is pumpkin pie spice.  You might be able to track them down for an exorbitant price in specialist shops, but I am more resourceful than that.  For the puree, I roasted a piece of pumpkin for an hour then mashed it.  For the pumpkin pie spice, I combined half a teaspoon each of cinnamon and ginger with a grating of nutmeg on top - I have no idea how authentic that is, but I wasn't going to look up what's in pumpkin pie spice at the time of night I was making this pie.  A major oversight on my part was not having cream - a bit silly given that pumpkin pie has a custard filling.  However, I improvised with natural yoghurt, which dare I say it, seemed to work.  (It also used up the remainder of a pot of yoghurt that I was not particularly fond of.)

The crust was Dorie Greenspan's Good for Almost Everything Pie Dough rather than the one in the book, as that is the one that I am used to.

Although the crust got a bit knocked around (you can see where my oven mitts mauled it getting it out of the oven), the end result was pretty good:  

I served this sans cream, as it is "healthy" enough as it is ;)

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia (the Pilgrims didn't land here!), so Christmas is our next big celebration.  They put up the gorgeous tree in the foyer of our building over the weekend:

This year, it has winky lights - I love it.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of my US readers!