Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday bar NONE! Cooking and eating delicious food with my wonderful family and friends, laughing, reminiscing and making new memories is the BEST DAY of the year.
If I could have Thanksgiving every day my world would be a better place. I really think it should be a mandatory once-a-month occurrence for every family and families of friends. Cooking food with people you love and sharing it is a visceral bonding experience. It’s like a testimony to LOVE. Plan to get in the kitchen, cook meals together and share them more often. If more people did this our worlds would be a better places and the world would surely improve. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!
The IACP conference is coming to town in 2012. Come down this Saturday (11/19) to Smorgasburg to Win-Win-Win! Eat fantastic artisan made foods, sample delicious soup from Jimmy’s No. 43 at our booth, enjoy a beautiful fall day on the Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront and support an dynamic food charity by purchasing chances to win holiday gifts for you and/or your loved ones! AND find out about International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP), one the best culinary conferences on the planet, that’s coming to NYC for the first time ever, in March 2012.
I’m a potato freak! I often ask people this hypothetical question: “If you had to give up two out of the four major carbs for life: Pasta, Rice, Potatoes or Bread? Which two would it be?”
Unless they already don’t eat gluten, they usually get really antsy and whiny and say, “Please don’t make me choose!.”
Me, I’d kick pasta and bread to the curb and live on rice and potatoes! Although my least favorite way of eating potatoes is mashed—people find this CRAZY—but I love them every other way: baked; steamed; scalloped; fried; roesti; boiled; roasted; pancakes; stewed; curried, etc… And of course, home fries! If I was told I could not make this recipe any more, I would get antsy and whiny and my world would shrink measurably.
For some reason I wind up with lots of dried fruit scraps. Where do they all come from? Sahadi’s mostly and they are the result of buying them by the pound and 1/2 pound and using them in recipes calling for a cup here and 1/2 cup there.
One year, I wound up with a several pounds of dried apricots after the Chocolate Show. They sat for months and got drier and drier. I kept moving the bag around thinking, “I have to do something with these!.” But they continued to sit around and mock me.
Wow! Wow!! Wow!!! The spread of over 75 pies at Pie Party Potluck LIVE! was breathtaking, jaw dropping and mouth watering. I’d never seen anything like it. Well maybe in a bakery, but even they lacked the variety and the made with loved-ness of the Pie Party Potluck pies…
When Ken and I decided to host Pie Party Potluck LIVE!! I kept imagining what it would be like? How many people/pies would actually show up? How many people can we fit at Rodeo Bar? Have we invited too many people? Too few? Can we fit more? Weeks and weeks of questions that would only be answered when the day actually came.
I bought this hilarious “Praise The Lard” t-shirt from Prather Meats at the Ferry Building in San Francisco (you can’t buy them online, but if you go there grab one—it’s a conversation piece), but I’ve never used it much for cooking. Strange for a gal who worships at the Church Of Pork Fat...
I love cooking with Jarlsberg. I think it’s because the holes in the cheese always freaked me out as a kid. I’m not gluten intolerant, but I love making food for my friends who have food allergies. My aim was to make a gluten free pie for PIe Party Potluck LIVE! so the people who were coming and couldn’t eat gluten would have another option. As it turned out, no one at the party was gluten free, but the gluten eaters happily scarfed down this pie too.
I felt a little like I cheated because I wanted to make a gluten free flour based crust using chick pea flour, but my test crust went from OK to awful. I decided to stick to making something that was delicious and gluten free without having to reinvent the wheel.
My favorite kind of recipe? One that’s dead easy and makes me look like a genius! Claudia Roden’s Basic Pie Dough 1 from The Book Of Jewish Food, is one such recipe. I used it to make samosas for my niece’s birthday party five months ago—I made heaps so I could freeze ‘em. Isn’t the freezer magical—it may be my favorite major appliance. I finished the last two samosas this morning when I cleaned out the freezer. I threw them in the toaster oven frozen and they were still delish and the pastry crisped up beautifully. You can also use this dough to make empanadas, pasties or any kind of savory hand held pie.
This dough is easy to make and requires no resting so it’s FAST—another thing I love in a recipe! I love working with this dough because it’s oily and doesn’t stick to your hands and is well behaved when you roll it. When baked, the texture is a little flaky, yet it’s strong enough to hold a heavy filling.
Lemon meringue pie was the first pie I ever made. Edie, my mom’s best friend, taught me how to bake during the summers we spent with her in Copake Lake. She gave me my first cookbook, The Joy Of Cooking. I was so lucky to have her in my life, I loved her. She contracted Alzheimer’s disease when she was in her late 40’s and passed away after a very long time being battled by it.
I’ve made what seems like a zillions of pies since then, but the first one was the catalyst. Wherever Edie is, I know she’s thrilled to bits that those first lessons have led to Pie Party Potluck LIVE!
Join food bloggers, food writers, food entrepreneurs, chefs, bakers, restaurateurs, other food biz peeps and pie enthusiasts on October 15th at the Rodeo Bar eating pie!!!
Ken and I are so excited to get to hang out with old friends (and eat pie!) and to meet a whole bunch of friends from Twitter in real life (and eat pie) and to meet a bunch of new people (and eat pie!). Come share the PIE LOVE!
The expression PIE EYED means “drunk” which I was, with pie. That’s how I felt this past July, when hundreds and hundreds of delicious pies were being made, photographed, written about and displayed on blogs, Twitter and FB and more. I didn’t get to taste one—not even the one I made.
On Saturday, October 15th, 2011, pie enthusiasts (who live or can get to New York City) and I will be able to get some pie in-mouth satisfaction.
