Oatmeal Pie

There are a lot of recipes online for oatmeal pie--I can't find one that matches the recipe I use, but this one comes decently close.  Basically, it's just a pie with oatmeal plus sweeteners and eggs in the filling; ostensibly it was intended as a cheap substitute for pecan pie.  I got my recipe from Granny Miller, aka Katharine Grossman, who used to have a blog site but now has consolidated her blog postings into books (I have one and they're worth getting).

This recipe uses maple syrup as the primary sweetener--something wet is needed because the oats need to soften (FWIW, stick to quick oats--I tried old-fashioned once and they didn't really soften enough).  Sorghum or corn syrup will also work, but the maple syrup has a stronger flavor.

I started off with a swaged/cold-pressed crust.  This time I used coconut oil as the fat...the first time I have ever used it.  It's interesting stuff.  Solid at room temperature, but it liquefies at not too much higher temps.  I used a 50/50 mix of white and whole wheat flour, which is pretty typical.  As I have probably mentioned elsewhere, when I'm doing a crust this way I use more flour--about 1 1/4 cup usually.

The finished product looks a little rough because of the crust and not necessarily all that appealing but it has good flavor.  The pie below was entered into a Pi Day competition at work and it won (though admittedly there weren't many entrants).

It doesn't really taste like pecan pie to me.  I think when I used sorghum one time it did so more.  It has almost a pumpkin spice essence to it because of the cloves.  But almost everyone liked it.