By guess and by gosh pumpkin custard

I love to experiment with recipes. Sometimes it works. Occasionally it doesn't. But it's fun.

I decided that since I'm the only person around here who eats pie crust, and I'm not crazy wild about it myself unless it's really, really good (which it rarely is), I decided to skip the crust and make something akin to a pumpkin custard instead of a pumpkin pie. I bought a can of Libby's Easy Pumpkin Pie Mix. I mixed it with eggs and evaporated milk as called for, but poured it into a casserole dish instead of a pie pan. (What? Custard cups? Who has that many custard cups? Who wants to bother with that many custard cups?) Then I went to bake it just like a pie.

Then I reconsidered. Probably having a starting temp of 425 for 15 minutes was to cook the crust, of which I didn't have any. Probably without a crust the higher temp was a bad idea. As if on cue, I started getting wafts of browning smells from the oven. Oops. I pulled the casserole dish out of the oven until I could get the heat down a bit.

My husband wandered through and mentioned his grandmother always used water baths for custard. Well, I almost always do too, but in the press of getting several things done at once I'd forgotten. It's not like I cook a lot of custard. (I should change that. We like custard, and it's relatively easy to make. But I digress.)

I did not have a big enough pan to put the casserole dish in a proper water bath, so I used a broiling pan and got water up almost halfway to the top. This is not at all as high as it should be, but did I mention I didn't have a big enough pan to do any better?

So, I put it back in the oven, this time at 350 degrees, in its half-bath, and cooked it until it was done. I can't tell you how long that was, because I just kept checking and adding time, but not keeping track.

But here's the kicker. It came out wonderful (if I do say so myself). It was light and moist and creamy and when you added a bit of Cool Whip it was one of the best desserts we've ever had around here. Forget trying to get pie pieces just the right size, too. With this stuff, in a casserole dish, you just scoop out as much or as little as you want. How easy can it get?

So.... do I have to do all that early-too-hot, water-bath-late-and-low stuff or can I get the same results by sticking it in the oven in a more or less proper water bath at 350 from the get-go? I'm going to try the easy way next time, in part because I'm not at all sure I could replicate the sequence-that-worked if I tried.

If you're wondering about my title: my neighbors in Wisconsin, back when I worked there, called cooking by the seat of your pants "by guess and by gosh" cooking. I hear it's a term commonly used in the Midwest. At any rate, that's definitely what this effort was.