Chocolate Silk Pie and Harmons Thanksgiving Pie Fest!

Gathering with my Harmons blogger friends is always a treat. It's especially wonderful when we gather to share dishes we have made. A few weeks ago, we prepared pies and Christmas brunch to get us in the holiday spirit! I'm so excited to share a new recipe with you for the most simple Chocolate Silk Pie you will ever make, along with four other  amazing recipes for your Thanksgiving lineup! 

photo credit Caroline from Armelle Blog

I cannot think of a better way to start the month of November than with P I E. 

You know how I feel about pie. 

Pie is love, in my book. You can imagine how I felt when we gathered and all brought a pie to share. 

Let's just say it was a love fest. 

Here are the links to all of the pies we enjoyed at our Harmons blogger pie love fest... 

(thanks to Caroline from Armelle Blog for the next few photos!)

One Sweet Appetite-Streusel Pumpkin Pie

La Fuji Mama - Gingerbread Chess Pie

Armelle Blog - French Apple Tart

The Vintage Mixer- Almond Butter Pie

My new favorite chocolate pie is the pie I shared. It's the World's Best Chocolate Silk Pie. 

Why the World's Best? 

1. The flavor is amazing. Just enough chocolate to satisfy a chocolate lover. 

2. Smooth and silky. Beating for a looooong time is the key. 

3. No bake filling. Some will say, raw eggs? No thanks. If you're pregnant, wait till after you deliver to make this. But otherwise, I think a true chocolate silk pie means you'll be eating a few eggs, uncooked. 

4. 5 ingredients. That alone is reason enough to make this pie. 

5. Great beginner pie. All you have to do is beat together ingredients for filling. If you are unsure about making crust, crush up 3/4 package of Oreos  in food processor with 4 tablespoons melted butter and a tablespoon of sugar, press into pie plate. Now you've got yourself The World's Best Chocolate Silk Pie in the World's Most Simple Chocolate Cookie Crust. 

Congrats! 

The World's Best Chocolate Silk Pie

A Bountiful Kitchen, adapted from Allrecipes.com

1 cup butter at room temperature

1 1/2 cups sugar

4 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted in double boiler and then cooled

2 teaspoons vanilla or  1/2 teaspoon vanilla and 1 teaspoon almond flavoring

4 eggs

1- 9 inch baked pie shell (recipes below)

Cream butter in a mixing bowl.  If using a stand mixer, use a paddle attachment to cream the butter and sugar, then switch to a whisk attachment to add the remaining ingredients. Gradually beat in the sugar with an electric mixer until light colored and well blended ( about 3 minutes). Stir in the thoroughly cooled chocolate, and vanilla extract. Add two eggs, beating 5 minutes on medium speed, then add the remaining two eggs, beat for 5 additional minutes. 

Using a spatula, scrape the chocolate filling into a cooled, baked pie shell.
Refrigerate at least 4 hours before serving.

Garnish with fresh whipped cream, chocolate curls if desired. 

Tips:

-Make the crust the day before or earlier in the day so the crust has time to cool completely before filling. You may also refrigerate the crust after cooking to help the crust cool more quickly. 

-You must have a mixer to make this. Preferably a stand mixer, or a person willing to stand and hold the mixer for a long time. 

-The pie filling recipe requires following the directions very carefully. It is very important the butter is at room temperature (not melted) , or it will not beat up properly.  Also, it is very important the eggs are beaten for 5 minutes after each addition for a total of 10 minutes. 

-You may use a single baked pie shell or a cookie crust shell. I have included recipes for two of my favorites below. Make sure to let the crust cool completely before filling!

-This pie is best when made the day before serving or early in the day to allow it to set up properly. 

Single Pie Crust
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup solid shortening
1/4 cup cold water

Cut shortening into flour and salt in medium size bowl, until the mixture resembles small pieces the size of peas. Add cold water all at once. Mix with a fork until dough starts to form into a ball, do not over mix. Add additional flour to the dough just until the dough is not sticky. Sprinkle flour out onto a flat surface. Roll the dough out and place in a 9 inch pie plate. Lightly press into the corners of the plate. Crimp the edges. Using a fork, pierce the sides and bottom of the pie dough. Refrigerate crust for 30 minutes. Meanwhile, place oven rack on bottom third of oven and turn oven to 500 degrees.
Bake for 8-10 minutes or until golden. Let cool completely before cooling.


Chocolate Graham Cookie Crust
2 cups graham cracker cookie crumbs
1 1/2 cups Oreo cookie crumbs (white centers removed)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, melted

Preheat oven to 375 degrees
In the bowl of a food processor or blender, process the graham crackers and Oreos to make crumbs.
In a bowl mix together the cookie crumbs, sugar and butter with your hands. Press the mixture evenly into a 9-inch pie pan. (It will seem like an excessive amount of crumbs, but it will compress down quite a bit with pressure.) Cover the crust with plastic wrap and top with another 9-inch pan, pressing quite firmly to make a smooth surface. Bake the crust for 15 minutes.
Remove the crust from the oven and let cool completely before filling.

This post was sponsored by Harmons Grocery, all opinions are mine. 

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Loaded Baked Potato Soup in Bread Bowls

This Loaded Baked Potato Soup in Bread Bowls is the perfect meal for your trick or treat night! It's always easier to get your kids to eat on Halloween night if you have a tradition of making something fun to eat. I love this Loaded Baked Potato Soup because it's a quick, easy, filling and delicious. You can load it up with extra toppings, or serve it straight out of the pot.

I found these cute bread bowls at Harmons Grocery in Farmington, if you don't live close to Harmons, you can pick up any type of small loaf artisan or french bread and carve out the middle. I loved the Harmons loaf, it was a bit more dense than other bread bowls I have purchased, which was perfect for holding a thick rich bowl of soup. We used the carved out pieces for dunking in the soup. Mmmmmm. So good.

Don't you love the little stem made out of pretzel?
Happy Halloween!

ABK's Loaded Baked Potato Soup
A Bountiful Kitchen

1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 cup chicken or vegetable broth
2 cups milk, plus additional for thinning soup
1 cup cheese
2 cups baked potato, scooped out or in chunks
1/4 cup sour cream

crumbled cooked bacon
additional grated cheese
sour cream
chopped chives or green onion

Melt butter in a stockpot over medium to medium high heat. Add flour, whisk and continue to cook for about two minutes, add salt and pepper. Whisk in broth. Stir until smooth. Turn heat to medium.
Slowly add milk, continue to whisk. Add grated cheese and whisk. Fold in cooked potato. Cook until bubbly and smooth. Just before serving, add sour cream. Heat until bubbly. Turn heat to simmer.
Scoop out bread bowls. Serve soup in bowls, add milk if the soup gets too thick.
Top with crumbled bacon, grated cheese, chives, and a spoonful of sour cream.
Serves 2-4, about 1 1/2 cup servings.

Tips:
-I used potato that had been baked a few days earlier. I scooped the potato into a bowl and used the skins for baked potato skins. If you are baking the potatoes for this recipe, scrub the skins, bake the potatoes to use in this recipe. It is not necessary to peel the potato before chopping for the soup.
-This recipe may require more salt and or pepper depending on the amount of flavor in the broth.
-This recipe is easily doubled.

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Favorite Summer Pasta Dinner

You know those nights when you just cant bring yourself to cook, but the thought of eating drive thru makes your stomach turn?? This is my simple solution. It's called Favorite Summer Pasta (and anything you have in the fridge) Dinner.




Here's the deal. Look in your fridge or freezer. Pull out any type of vegetable. It can be broccoli, carrots, peppers, spinach, green beans, asparagus. You'll need about 2 cups. Then some protein. Chicken goes well in this dish. Or you can use just about anything you have. I'd probably pass on Spam, but almost anything else goes. Shrimp, turkey, bratwurst, leftover steak, pork, even ground meat. Or if you're not a meat lover, you can simply add more veggies. Tofu (a firm texture) folded into this would be wonderful too!








I used Harmons brand of pasta, which I highly recommend. It has a comparable quality to that of pasta made in Italy. Trust me on this, I've carried home bags full of dried pasta from Italy on past trips. Once I realized for about the same price I could purchase the imported items here, I filled my carry-on with other items.

Get yourself a pot and grow a few fresh herbs.
Joy in a pot. 

If you have access to fresh tomatoes, use them! If you don't have any fresh tomatoes, use boxed or canned. And the fresh herbs? If you don't already have an herb pot, vow to grow one next summer.
In the amount of time it takes you to run to In and Out you can make this at home!
You're going to love it.
Promise.

Favorite Summer Pasta
A Bountiful Kitchen

1/2 lb Harmons pasta, any shape will do, I used Casarecce pictured above
2-14 oz or one 26.46 oz carton Pomi brand chopped tomatoes,
or about 28-30 oz chopped fresh tomatoes in their own juice
2 cloves fresh garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup fresh basil
2-3 tablespoons each fresh chopped oregano, rosemary, thyme
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon salt or to taste
fresh ground pepper
1/2 teaspoon sugar
1/4 cup cream (optional)
2 cups chopped fresh vegetable such as asparagus, broccoli, green beans, peppers, etc
2 cups chicken (or other meat), chopped into bite size pieces and cooked
1/2 cup grated Parmesan or Romano cheese, additional for topping pasta

Cook the pasta according to package directions until al dente, drain and set aside.
Pour the chopped tomatoes in a large saucepan. Simmer over medium high heat. Add garlic, herbs, olive oil, salt and pepper and sugar. Simmer for about 15 minutes or until reduced a bit.
Meanwhile, chop vegetables and place on plate and microwave for about 2 minutes, covered or until the veggies are barely cooked and bright in color. Toss into sauce and add chicken as well.
Add cream and cheese and cook for another minute. Remove from heat. Toss sauce with cooked pasta. Serve immediately with additional grated cheese on top.
Serves about 4 as a main dish or 6 as a side dish

Tips:
-This recipe is easy to double. Simply double the sauce and cook the entire package of pasta. Doubled, it will serve 8.
-It is best to use fresh vegetables and fresh herbs in this recipe. Although, the Pomi brand (purchased at Harmons) chopped tomatoes work very well in place of fresh tomatoes. if using fresh tomatoes, make sure to use a variety that will yield a lot of juice. I do not recommend using fresh Roma's in this recipe, they don't typically yield enough juice.
-I found the Harmons brand pasta needed a bit more cooking than the package directions. I cooked the pasta for about 10-11 minutes total for a perfect al dente texture. Make sure to test this in your kitchen. Depending on size of pot, how much water and pasta are in the pot, how hard the water is boiling will all be factors in how quickly pasta cooks. Do not over cook!

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Nathalie Dupree's Fudgy Brownies and Cooking Classes at Harmons!

THE Guide to Southern cooking. 

If you were able to sit down with one of the most popular cookbook authors in the US, what would you want to know (insert emoji with wide eyes and hand over mouth)?  Nathalie Dupree is coming to SLC to teach cooking classes at Harmons, and they asked me to do an interview with Nathalie to promote her upcoming visit and classes. We had a lovely conversation about everything from Julia Child and the influence she had on Nathalie's career path to her preferred fat in biscuits and pie crust. Some people want to know how to achieve world peace, I just want to talk crust, dough and chocolate. Nathalie is a gracious Southern Lady, so of course, she obliged and gave me all kinds of insider tips about one of her areas of expertise, biscuit making. Nathalie is the Queen of Biscuit Making. She's written a whole book about the subject.

One of Nathalie's 14 cookbooks...

Here's a bit of our conversation:
First, we discussed how her name is properly pronounced.  Since we have that in common ( you have no idea how many variations I have heard of my name- Sayuri (Si).  Her name is pronounced Natalie, not Na-THalie. Apparently her mother wanted Natalie, and her father wanted NaTHalie, and dad got his way in spelling. She was raised in Virginia and in her early years and had an opportunity to cook for her college dormitory one summer. Her mom didn't want her to be a cook, it wasn't "suitable work for a lady" back in the day. Her mother knew it would require working at night with men (yikes!) and lifting heavy equipment. It was not typical work for a woman in 1959.
But Nathalie loved cooking.
After she was married, she moved to London and while looking for a job, she "stumbled into" the Le Cordon Bleu Cooking School. She took a class, then went home and tried to duplicate what she had learned.  Everything she made flopped!  Nathalie said she considered herself a good cook and decided at that point she didn't want to be a "lady" and instead wanted to go to cooking school. A year later, she earned her advanced certificate.  At graduation, Nathalie talked to Julia Child about her future.  "Julia was very generous and available to people, I asked her - what I should do now and Julia told me I should teach cooking."

Nathalie instructing at Rich's Cooking School in Atlanta

The rest is history.  Nathalie has owned multiple restaurants, opened and enrolled more than 10,000 students at Rich's cooking school in Atlanta during her almost 10 years there. She has hosted more than 300 television shows on PBS, TLC, The Food Network and countless other appearances on national television shows. Nathalie has been the recipient of the prestigious James Beard award three times and was recently inducted to the Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America. Whew. And she's still going strong in her 75th year. With a reputation like that, I knew I had to honor Nathalie by making one of her recipes. We were in the mood for chocolate, so I made some of her Fudgy Brownies.
Oh my. They did not disappoint!

Ani could not wait to get her hands on a homemade brownie...

kid approved!

They lived up to Nathalie's amazing reputation.
If you want to learn from Nathalie, and live in the SLC area, she will be teaching  Southern Desserts, Cool Summer Eats, Southern Breakfast, and Southern Menus for Two at Harmons Cooking School, City Creek on May 22 & 23. I highly recommend taking a class. This would make such a fun girls night out or mother-daughter date.  Hurry and sign up the slots are filling fast...Hope to see you there!
Oh and the biscuit making tips? We'll have to talk about that on another post.

 

Nathalie Dupree's Fudgy Brownies

print recipe

1 cup unsalted butter
3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 (12-ounce) package semisweet-chocolate chips
1 cup chopped nuts (optional

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 13x9x2-inch pan.
Melt the butter over low heat; pour into a mixing bowl. Add the cocoa, and stir until well blended. Add the sugar, and mix well. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Add the flour, vanilla, and salt and stir just until mixed together. Do not overbeat. Stir in the chocolate chips and nuts. Spread in the pan and back 25 to 30 minutes. Let cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Cut into 24-squares.
The Brownies freeze wrapped in plastic wrap.

Tips:

-These brownies mix up quickly. I mixed the wet ingredients together and then added all of the dry ingredients (including the chocolate chips)  at once. Unfortunately, I was using a 1 1/2 cup measure when I added the flour, instead of a 1 cup measure, so my brownies are a bit more cakey than usual. They were still delicious. If you are looking for a more cake-like brownie, use 1 1/2 cups and reduce the cooking time to 20 minutes. They are perfect for frosting! 

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Savory Yams with Bacon, Cream and Fresh Thyme and Harmons Giftcard Giveaway Winner!

photo credit Becky, Vintage Mixer

A few weeks ago the Harmons bloggers gathered and had a little pre-Thanksgiving meal. It was an afternoon of  photo taking, discussing our favorite holiday dishes, and of course, feasting on good food. We all went away stuffed and excited to share new recipes with our readers!

Savory Yams with Bacon, Cream and Fresh Thyme

photo credit, Caroline Drake, Armelle Blog

We partnered with Harmons to offer five, yes, five $100 gift cards just in time for holiday grocery shopping! Harmons provided the gift cards, and we've provided recipes to make this your best holiday season, ever.

photo credit- Becky at Vintage Mixer

For our Harmons gathering, I made Slow Cooker Mashed Potatoes and Savory Yams with Bacon, Cream and Fresh Thyme (recipe below).
You'll want to follow each of the Harmons bloggers for multiple doses of amazing cooking and general family/lifestyle ideas each day! The other dishes that rounded out our meal and links to recipes are listed below. Don't forget to scroll to the bottom of this post for multiple chances to win a $100 giftcard!

Honey Whole Grain Dinner Rolls  and 

Fresh Cranberry Orange Relish from Becky at Vintage Mixer
love, love, loved both of these recipes. 

photo credit Becky, Vintage Mixer

photo credit Caroline Drake, Armelle Blog

Chocolate Mousse Pie from Caroline at Armelle Blog

made with an olive oil crust. On my list of pies to make this month.

photo credit, Caroline Drake

Sesame Green Beans with Bacon and Chestnuts 

from Rachael at LaFujimama
pretty sure this will be on my holiday table!

Sausage Herb Stuffing from Jesseca at One Sweet Appetite
can't wait to try this, stuffing is my favorite. 

photo credit Caroline Drake, Armelle Blog

Last, but not least is my recipe for Savory Yams with Bacon, Cream and Fresh Thyme.  This recipe is rich, without being over the top. So often yams are used in a sweet dish at holiday time. I thought creating a dish that used savory flavors would be perfect for our holiday gatherings. I've made it three times in the past three weeks, and it's been a hit every time.
Fifteen more days til Thanksgiving!
Can't wait.

Savory Yams with Bacon, Cream and Fresh Thyme
A Bountiful Kitchen
print recipe


5-6 medium size yams or sweet potatoes (about 8-10 cups total)
1/2 lb bacon
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small onion, chopped (about 1 cup)
1 cup heavy cream
fresh thyme, about 4 tablespoons stripped from stems, plus a few sprigs for garnish after cooking
salt and pepper

Wash yams, place in large pot. Cover with cold water. Bring water to boil and cook for about 30 minutes, or until barely fork tender.
Meanwhile, chop bacon and cook until crisp, drain grease and set aside.
Wipe out pan used to cook bacon, add 1 tablespoon of olive oil and cook until soft and slightly golden.
Remove yams from boiling water. Drain and set  yams on counter and let cool a bit. Peel and slice or cut into small chunks.
Place cut up yams in a greased 9 x 13 or similar size baking pan. Sprinkle with fresh thyme.
Drizzle fresh cream onto yams. Sprinkle with cooked onions and bacon.
Cover and bake for about 30 minutes at 350 degrees, or place in refrigerator until ready to bake.
May be made up to 3 days in advance. Let sit on counter when removing from refrigerator for about an hour before baking.
Garnish with additional fresh thyme before serving.

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