Chef Talk

A slice of pie is nice but a hand pie, be still my heart! Double crust, warm filling, a single serving pastry that can be eaten out of hand, a grown-up pop tart, only better!

When you bake a whole pie, there’s commitment; commitment to eight big pieces, ten thin slices or twelve slivers. That feels like a relationship when all I really want is a date. Maybe tonight I would like blueberry pie, tomorrow may feel like a peach kind of day, Thursday goes better with strawberry rhubarb. If I make a whole pie, I better have eight big, ten thin or twelve slivers of friends to help me or by the end of the week, I’ll have a half-eaten pie that I can’t bear to finish or throw away.

Sweet or savory, hand pies satisfy for dessert of course, but can stand in as a make-ahead breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Hand pies make use of leftovers, highlight seasonal stars, and please a crowd. Tupperware haters can easily tuck leftovers within a crust and it feels like a fresh new dish. Berries & fruits bubble with delight hidden inside a crisp hand pie crust, and those that don’t like to share or can’t compromise can have their way with a different variety. World peace by way of the hand pie!

There are a few tricks of the trade that will help make a good hand pie a better hand pie but don’t put too much pressure on yourself the first time. Get the feel of the dough, practice rolling rectangle instead of round, adjust for moisture levels in food; too much and you’ll be eating a soggy mess with a fork off a plate, not enough and you’ll feel like you’re eating a cardboard box. What’s the worst thing that can happen, you must practice more? That’s just more pie and what the heck can be wrong with that?

Sweet or Savory, Here’s some help:

• Filling ingredients should be small, so they cook quickly; big hunks and chunks won’t cook fast enough to keep up with the crust
• Fillings should be room temperature or else they will heat up the crust and the result will be soggy
• Don’t overfill hand pies, or they’ll burst at the seams. Some oozing is good, bursting not so much
• For best results, freeze the unbaked hand pies for 20 minutes before baking. This firms the fat in the crust back up and the result will be flakier
• If you have more willpower than most, freeze the unbaked pies for up to three months and then bake them straight out of the freezer (do not pass go, do not collect $200) but add an extra five or ten minutes to the cooking time
• And most importantly, those little beauties just came out of a steaming hot oven. Let hand pies cool for at least 10 minutes before eating. It’s hot in there!

If you planned for the dark days of winter and stashed fresh summer berries in your freezer, perfecting your hand-pie skills will be a great way to satisfy your sweet tooth. Enjoy!

For those who have been in class with me, I often share how baking is not really my thing. I am a savory chef through and through. I will trade formulas and pastry bags for a hot stove and raw ingredients any day. So here we are in the season of baking and I have to admit…I don’t love making holiday cookies and treats. I certainly love to enjoy them all though!

What I have leaned on in baking is mastering a few techniques and classic desserts and then change them up in different ways. My absolute go-to is a Flourless Dark Chocolate Souffle. It’s a handful of ingredients that I always have on hand, everyone loves chocolate, and it can be altered in so many ways.

If I’m making a Mexican-inspired meal, I’ll add a tomatillo blueberry sauce, or candied pepita garnish. Making Italian, I’ll add some Frangelico liqueur and top with hazelnuts. In the summer, I’ll pair it with a fresh berry sauce. Fall, add a salted caramel or warm spiced whipped cream with cardamom or cinnamon. In Winter, I love adding candied citrus zest or pomegranate. I have made this souffle over 100 times with all kinds of variations. My holiday version swaps in peppermint extract and is topped with whipped cream and crumbled peppermint.

My base chocolate souffle recipe is below – I hope you find inspiration with it all year long as well.

Growing up, we sat down at the family dinner table together almost every night.  A meal with a meat, a vegetable, and a starch was always served along with a salad (which my family ate last, my mother is French).  That time at the table was about sharing;  Sharing of food, of course, but also sharing about your day.  Each one of us had a different day, we interacted with different people or went different places but always came back together at the dinner table.

As an adult with kids of my own now, my husband and I have tried to stick true to this tradition.  A meal is on the table (or island) every night  at the same time.  If you aren’t home for “dinner time” your meal is placed on a plate wrapped in foil to be eaten when you get home, but never to be eaten alone.  I notice now as a mom that the dinner table is once again a shared space.  A space where I find out about the cute boy in class or the math test that didn’t go so well.  A space where lots of laughs and giggles happen as a funny story that happened in school is retold and shared.  A true shared space.  So, yes, I have a culinary degree and know how to make dinner but for me it’s not always about the food, it’s about the shared time.  It’s about the comfort of the people around your table that make the dinner experience a special one. 

One of my family’s favorite comfort foods is pot pie.  There is nothing better after a long day of school and activities than coming home to a warm Beef and Butternut Squash Pot Pie.  I hope by sharing this recipe your family will enjoy a wonderful warm meal in your shared space.

Book Clubs, Bunco Groups, Crafting Meetups. Like me, I’m sure many of you are proud card-carrying members of a group like this…or maybe two or three? We gather about once a month with like-minded friends, often around food (always with beverage) – and discuss, share, comfort, and occasionally transform one another. Sometimes you talk about the book… sometimes you don’t. But you often walk away with a good re-charged feeling.

My friends and I are quickly approaching 12 years strong for our Cooking Club. There are five of us. We had babies and toddlers back then. When we started a few of us were strangers, but that didn’t last long. What brought us together was the idea of showing up to the table and sharing a meal. The first several years we were very organized and uber enthusiastic not letting a month pass without a Club meeting on the calendar. At one point we even talked about compiling all our recipes into a cookbook (that lasted 5 minutes). In preparation for a meeting the host picks the theme and cooks the main dish while everyone else jumps in with a complimentary side-dish, dessert, or beverage. Some of my favorite and most memorable dinners have been… “All things Pumpkin”, “Wisconsin Supper Club”, “Comfort Food”, and “French.” There have been dishes that were fantastic…and those that were epic fails! But that is the fun of it. We still laugh about the time I brought an Avocado Chocolate Tart to a Latin themed dinner. We never had a chance to try it – the dog got to it before we could. I still wonder if that was an odd coincidence? When I excitedly arrived that evening, announcing my dessert, I recall not being met with equal enthusiasm. Plan B was a Jewel-Osco Bakery cake for dessert.

As the years have passed our Club meetings sometimes stretch to every eight to ten weeks. Our kids will soon be off to college. Sometimes we decide to eat together at a restaurant instead of cooking. And if you’re busy and just can’t find the time to pull a dish together…we welcome store bought. We have even taken our Club meetings on the road to Lake Geneva for a different scenery. But the idea of Cooking Club and the reason we started remains the same. We all show up to the table and share a meal. We catch up on each other’s lives. We laugh together and often laugh at each other. And most importantly, we walk away with a good feeling in our hearts and are recharged for what the next day brings… and thankful we made the time to share a meal at the table.  

Maybe at our next Cooking Club I’ll give the Avocado Chocolate Tart a go again. Or maybe you can make it for your next Club meetup. If you do, let me know what you think!

Who says the only place for a marshmallow is on a s’more? Now, don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a good s’more, but there is something about light and refreshing fruit that really hits the spot!

My family and I love this season for all the amazing produce, and specifically the fruit. We have a one year old daughter who eats anything and everything! And always on the menu for her are a wide variety of different fruits. However, this weekend we decided to play around with a different base for the fruit, and get our fancy on!

There is something really rewarding about taking your egg whites all the way from their fresh, out of the shell state to the beautiful fluffy meringue! All those thousands of tiny bubbles beginning to form. And beneath all that beauty is a network of proteins trapping the air bubbles, that gives your meringue its structure and volume.

Meringue offers a blank canvas for so many different things. (Also made an amazing cake with a swiss meringue buttercream, but we’ll save that story for another time J) We chose to go with a classic pavlova. What makes this a little different is the addition of cornstarch in the meringue. With cornstarch, your baked meringue is delicate and crispy on the outside while chewy and soft on the inside. In addition, allowing it to cool and rest in the oven after baking overnight helps to avoid cracking in the pavlova.

From here, you can run wild! We liked to capitalize on summer fruits like berries and citrus! Atop the pavlova is an orange curd and whipped cream, then berries to garnish.

I love being able to get others involved to decorate and garnish with the fruit!  The best part is, you can make it completely seasonal – switch up the berries for poached apples or pears in the fall! And change up the sauces that you serve it with. Try your hand at this delicate and delicious dessert and customize it however you like!