Sweet Potato Pie, Version 2, Other Baked Goods, and Reflection

A fully cooked sweet potato pie!

For once I didn't eat plain leftover roasted sweet potatoes. Instead, I baked with them and made a sweet potato pie.  I'm not Southern, so I made a maple-sweetened pumpkin pie with sweet potatoes instead of pumpkin and 1/4 cup of maple syrup instead of organic sugar.  Besides being out of organic sugar and coconut sugar, I'm running low on "white" flours; I used half buckwheat flour in the crust recipe from this pecan pie post.





Easy, done, no real recipe.



"Did you say 'America' in a way that other-izes other countries?"  I just thought of that line from the "PC Principal" episode of South Park (Season 19, Episode 1) when I looked at the last Sweet Potato Pie I made.

Other things I made:

Emergency Monkey Bread, since TC began preheating the oven while I was using it as a draft-free space for my yeasted dough to rise.  Should've put a note on it, even though I explained to him what I was doing and very clearly said not to turn the oven on...  The dough partially baked before I rescued it and quickly dunked it in sugar and cinnamon and coconut oil, not in that order.





The only reason I was making a yeasted dough, originally intended for cinnamon rolls, was to test out this mixer my FIL found.  As far as mixers go, it was pretty weak sauce, but it sort of worked.  I can't tell if using a mixer made a difference in the texture of the finished product.

 

I also made "gingerbread for the journey," the original recipe for which I had pinned on one of several Pinterest boards I deconstructed last weekend.  Instead of pumpkin, I used applesauce.  Curse reversed! 

Finally, I figured out how to tune my Pinterest feed to not show me pins about food all the goddamned time. I have other interests, and I think being way more into my other interests than cooking shows me how much I have recovered from my eating disorder.  After following The Artist's Way program the last few months (the third book, Finding Water), focusing on my writing again is my priority. 

It's a little hunch I've been entertaining (please, do pull up a chair): my interest in wellness and nutrition grew out of my eating disordered past, that my interest in nutrition also comes from that place, and my attempt at pursuing health coaching was an outgrowth of those interests.  Either way, I'm not terribly interested in health coaching right now, and my job has definitely become more "content creation and management" than "wellness" over the past two years.

[caption id="attachment_4342" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Can you say, "Creepy collectible dolls?"[/caption]

Of course, I may be quitting before I've even begun.  I liked giving lectures and classes about healthy cooking, and I like doing healthy cooking demonstrations.  I wonder if I'm using the excuse of being young--my contemporaries don't give a crap about health and wellness; my life experience is fairly limited to my weird niche interests--to avoid even starting coaching.  Life! Youth! Turmoil!

Something else I learned from the experience of being bulimic: people hide everything.  People put on their best faces, and it's not OK to be not OK.  Yes, there is a time and place for everything, and there are in/appropriate expressions of emotion.  But let's all be real here for a second and acknowledge that no one truly knows their life path, and especially not at age 25.  I turn 25 in 29 days; that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.  Now go listen to some Brene Brown on Vulnerability.

This, this is why I don't list my blog on my resume anymore.  Because good god in heaven forbid that I am a real person who changes over time.  No one likes static characters (and static villains are SO BORING, both to read and to write), yet most HR and hiring decision-makers seem to like static resumes.  What's up with that? 

 

Yesterday, I read an article on Ask a Manager about using your real name on a resume.  I've had more statistical success with resumes being answered for my middle name instead of my first name (and my very Anglo-Saxon married name instead of my Italian maiden name), and apparently my legal first name makes people think I'm difficult and not a team player (because that's what Q totally means, sure). 

Yet, the AAM article gave me pause: my legal first name is Q, it's on all of my identification, and that's what I prefer to be called.  So, yeah, I don't want to go through an interview process under "Jane," get hired, then have a conversation such as, "Oh, BTW, you're going to be cutting that paycheck to Q since it's on my drivers license and stuff, and that's what I prefer to be called.  I just played on your sense of familiarity and security with a normative name to get in the door.  I also uncovered your bias towards normative names.  How's that 'equal opportunity employer' compliance working for you?  SUCKERS."

Familiarity meaning, most people learn to read some kind of "Dick and Jane see Spot.  See Spot run.  Run, Spot, Run."  Or Jane Austen, which most people have to read in high school.  Yeah.  No one likes to be fooled.

It's the Instagram tactic: crappy photo + filter = slightly better photo with deliberately "artsy" look.  The frosting is the "Super-Natural Frosting" from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, very similar to the Babycakes NYC frosting, made with agave, soymilk powder, and coconut oil.  The texture, when warm, is very disconcertingly like, um, things not appropriate for dinner table conversation, and it hardens into a fondant-like paste.  I used a food injector to make those lines.