Ricotta Tart with Graham Cracker Crust

Long ago, in college, a bunch of my roommates decided to try the South Beach Diet. I was never good at sticking to a diet of any kind, but not being one to miss out on a group activity I decided I would do it too. A day and a half in I was driving in downtown Boston, and started to get really dizzy from not eating enough carbs. More likely it was from not eating enough food in general since Phase One of the diet barely lets you eat anything. I went directly home and ate a club sandwich, and that was the end of the diet for me.

The one thing I actually really liked from the diet was the ricotta dessert. It was just ricotta cheese mixed with Equal and vanilla extract. But I added crumbled graham crackers to it. So why not make a real, structured dessert out of it?

Graham cracker crust:
1 packet of graham crackers (8 crackers)
2 Tbl. melted butter

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Break up the graham crackers in a food processor, or by hand. I didn't feel like dragging the food processor out so I put them in a big ziploc bag and broke them up by hand.



Next, mix in the melted butter. Next time I make this, I will probably use 4 tablespoons of melted butter. The crust did stick together, but could have been more cohesive. Press into a 9-inch pie dish. If you have two pie dishes, it would be easy to press the second dish into the crust to really get it flat and even.



Bake the crust for 8-10 minutes.

Ricotta mixture:
1 15-oz. container of ricotta cheese
2 Tbl. powdered sugar
2 tsp. vanilla

Mix ricotta, sugar, and vanilla together and carefully spread into the crust once it has cooled a bit. Add fruit on top - I did strawberries, but you could do whatever you want - raspberries, blueberries, peach slices...



As I said, I should have added a little more melted to butter to get the crust to hold more. It wasn't falling apart, but could have been better. Peter said he wanted the ricotta to be sweeter, but I was happy with it. If you want it sweeter you can always add more sugar. You know what else would be really good with a graham cracker crust? Ice cream pie...