Hankerin’ for sweet potato pie

November 28, 2004

Yes, it is possible to make sweet potato pie in a country that doesn’t grow the sweet spuds, using little more than a $29 blender and a dysfunctional microwave.

It doesn’t really look like pie, but it’s not bad.

What has become known as the Sweet Potato Pie Incident at 3rd Battalion’s Delta Company began innocently enough.

It all started with a hankerin’.

Capt. Chad Higginbotham of Hamburg, Delta Company commander, missed sweet potato pie.

“All my life my grandmother has made sweet potato pie for my birthday in September,” he said. “It’s about that time that I get a hankerin’ for it. I didn’t get one for my birthday, but I figured we could make one for Thanksgiving.”

There isn’t a kitchen that could be used to whip up a pie, however. Higginbotham had a microwave and a drill. Can you make sweet potato pie with a microwave and a drill?

Higginbotham went to the Internet to find out.

That’s where he found Verla’s microwave sweet potato pie recipe.

Who’s Verla? Well, who knows.

But she will always be thought of fondly by the boys of Delta Company.

She was the inspiration for what became the most expensive sweet potato pie ever made.

First, Higginbotham e-mailed his wife, Rhonda, a list of ingredients to send. She measured and mixed the baking mix, sugar, cloves and cinnamon. She bought the canned sweet potatoes, evaporated milk and vanilla.

And then she mailed it all to Iraq.

Postage was $12.

When the package arrived and Thanksgiving neared, Higginbotham realized he had no way of mixing the ingredients.

The brainstorming began.

“I’ve used a drill with a welding rod and a nut on the end to mix paint before,” he said. “Would that work?”

Then he and Sgt. 1st Class Greg Mayfield of Springdale thought of bending a hanger into a make-shift whisk that could attach to the drill.

In the end, they decided to buy a blender.

The quest began at 6 p.m. Thanksgiving eve, when Higginbotham shopped for a blender in an Iraqi store on post.

He paid $29 for it. Nope, he didn’t haggle.

As he and Mayfield walked out of the shop with their blender, Higginbotham said he was sure blenders were cheaper at Wal-Mart. Mayfield cracked that they should drive off base and find a Wal-Mart if he was that concerned about it.

Moments later a huge blast reverberated from the west.

“Forget Wal-Mart,” Mayfield said.

As they started mixing, they discovered the can of sweet potatoes held 29 ounces, not the 16 ounces called for in the recipe.

Measuring cups are hard to find in a war zone, so they guessed and poured about half of the sweet potatoes into the blender.

So are eggs.

To get the last ingredient — eggs — Higginbotham called on the company armorer, Spc. Larry Cloninger of North Little Rock.

Cloninger, who is one of two supply guys at the company, can get his hands on just about anything.

He went into the chow hall, where they serve eggs to order for breakfast, and ordered two raw eggs. The chow hall sergeant owed him a favor, he said. I find it’s best not to know how Cloninger procures stuff.

“Hey, he’s supply,” Mayfield said. “He can get anything.”

They poured the concoction into a rectangular, plastic container and popped it in the microwave.

The directions call for it to cook on 50 percent power for 15 to 20 minutes.

Well, the sad little microwave doesn’t actually have 50 percent power. It runs on full power 50 percent of the time and then cuts out.

So Higginbotham and Mayfield watched the orange pie rise as it cooked and then fall when the power cut out. Finally, it was done.

At the sound of the microwave dinger, Mayfield noted that the pie looked “gelatinous” in the middle. “I’m not sure I would classify it as a pie,” he said.

Well, there wasn’t a crust or anything, but I think it was a pie.

And it was good.

“I think it gets better every day, kind of like chili,” Higginbotham said today.

Posted by Amy at November 28, 2004 11:58 AM