Cherry-Persimmon Pie (+ Bonus Holiday Party Food Porn)

Now. Normally I pride myself on making absolutely everything from scratch when I entertain. But there are exceptions.

Look, gentle readers, the holiday party I had on Sunday turned out to be quite the freaking production, let me tell you. I made like 6 trips to the Key Foods, formed and froze dozens of meatballs and phyllo triangles, shoehorned some compound butter into a star-shaped cookie cutter … and on and on and on. No rest for the wicked—you might say I was trying to stave off the prospect of getting coal in my stocking.

The menu, which yielded shockingly few leftovers, was as follows:

An 8-pound ham glazed with molasses and studded with pineapples, with sriracha mayo and horseradish sour cream accoutrements.

Two roast chickens, stuffed with orange wedges and leeks for flavor and (dubious) presentation.

An embarrassment of quiches (mushroom-leek, tomato-arugula, and bacon-arugula, all with Swiss cheese).

A tricolor penne salad with goat cheese, roasted tomatoes, and olives.

This Year's Thanksgiving Dessert Table

Clockwise from top left (pie pan rim touching wine bottle): Pumpkin pie, buttermilk-lemon chess pie, chocolate-pecan-coconut-bourbon tart, pumpkin chocolate squares, chocolate chip cookies*, spiced apple pie, cheesecake with cranberry topping 

Note: We had 11 people for Thanksgiving. 

* These were provided by Aunty Olga. Brooklyn Girls Cooking is not affiliated with these cookies.

Chicken Potpie

Chicken potpie occupies a unique place in the ’Merickan culinary pantheon, in that it is a classic retro-Americana "leftovers dish" yet does not evoke any of the shudders or gag reflexes such dishes are wont to elicit. Compare, for example, tuna casserole—just the name has served as a punch line for decades of family sitcoms, the premise of the joke being that hidden under those canned dried "onions" is everything that was about to go bad in the fridge. Even meatloaf, which has recently acquired new panache in this recessionary era of "upscale comfort food" (more on this at a later date, in my upcoming post about meatloaf) inspires a wide range of visceral reactions in people, many of which are extremely negative.

But chicken potpie grosses out nobody (except perhaps carb-phobic Atkins devotees, but we all know they lead miserable and bitter lives anyway). It is hearty, it is buttery, and it makes efficient and cheap use of leftovers, supplemented by staples you probably already have in your kitchen. Often, I roast a chicken for just myself and The Rob, with an eye toward making potpie out of the leftovers. With the plump roaster I got on sale recently for 99 cents a pound, I was not only able to do that, but make a couple sandwiches' worth of curried chicken salad—oh, and of course, I made stock from the chicken carcass.

Usually, when I make chicken potpie, I put the filling in a gratin pan and lay a crust over just the top of the dish (as opposed to having a bottom crust lining the pan). It's not like this is exactly a "light" dish any way you prepare it, but I find that you don’t really need all that extra crust.

Chili Cheese Pie

Among the joyful signs that summer has arrived in Brooklyn are the appearance of Mr. Softee trucks, Red Hook taco vendors, and stoop sales. It is a triumph to score a $50 hardcover coffee-table cookbook that was hardly, if ever, even cracked open, for a few bucks.

A few weekends ago at a BK stoop sale, I acquired Alfred Portale’s Gotham Bar and Grill Cookbook ($5), plus a vintage original 1984 edition of Martha Stewart’s Hors d’Oeuvres ($1), both utterly pristine (except for a super-endearing inscription in the Portale, “Merry Christmas '97, Handsome”--which led to a whole discussion speculating about whether one of the guys I bought it from had written it to the other and they were just clearing house, or if the current boyfriend had demanded that the cookbook inscribed by the ex be put out at the stoop sale. Being a romantic, I assumed the former and was crestfallen when someone to whom I was eagerly showing my finds pointed out the possibility of the latter. But I digress).

Flipping through the Martha book, I instantly fixated on a recipe for Corn Cups Filled With Beef Chili, and decided to adapt it into a full-size entree pie.

This recipe can be done in under an hour -- you just add the hot filling to the baked pie crust (which is REALLY EASY TO MAKE, I SWEAR), so you can make your filling as the crust bakes. (Of course I felt the need to top the whole thing with cheese, requiring a few more minutes of oven time, but that’s your call.)

This would be a great meal for a family with kids; it looks like a cross between hamburger, pizza, and pie, and feeds plenty of people with one big dish. It can include a variety of veggies and could be done with ground turkey or chicken, or just beans if your fam is vegetarian.