We had 17 people over for Thanksgiving this year. Every year, I promise myself that I’m going to photograph the spread. Every year, I fail miserably at it, mainly because I’m running around like a madwoman for days both before and after Thanksgiving, and there’s hardly time to stop. This year, though, the hubby and I promised ourselves that we’d take the day off before Thanksgiving to give ourselves extra time to prepare for all the food and guests. And you know what? In a total “duh” moment, we both realized that extra prep time is the key to having less stress before guests arrive. I had time to bake three pies, people. Three. Pies.
Of the pies I made (pumpkin and sweet potato being the other two), the pecan pie disappeared the fastest. It deserved to be the winner. I made my recipe based off of this one from Smitten Kitchen, one of my all-time favorite baking blogs. Deb Perelman, the author of Smitten Kitchen, talks resolutely about not using Karo corn syrup (or any corn syrup, for that matter) as the sweet, syrupy base for pecan pie. In this day and age, corn syrup is no longer in fashion, for good reason. The unfortunate part of Deb’s recipe is that it calls for golden syrup, which I don’t readily keep in my pantry and didn’t really want to make an extra special trip to the grocery store in search of it.