Nannie’s Chocolate Pie

Happy Pi Day! Fun Fact: Did you know that today is the most accurate of all Pi Days? To be more specific today 3-14-15 at 9:26:53 was the most accurate. (Sometimes hanging out with Husband is really handy.) Anyway, I’ve been looking for an excuse to share Nannie’s Chocolate Pie recipe with you and what better day?

Nannie was raised in north Georgia and was the quintessential Southern cook. My earliest memories are in her kitchen learning to dredge chicken and crack an egg with one hand. She was the master of Sunday luncheon and one of her specialties was this chocolate pie. It’s chocolate mousse with a meringue topping so be sure that you have enough time to let it set.

You’ll Need:

Baked pie shell (If you have a deep dish, you’ll only need one, but I used 2 shallow shells.)

³⁄₄ cup sugar
¹⁄₃ cup cocoa
2 cups milk
1 tsp. vanilla
3 Tblsp. cornstarch
3 egg yolks
1 Tblsp. butter

Make It:

In a heavy-bottomed pot, mix sugar, cocoa, and cornstarch.

Add egg yolks and milk.

Place over medium heat and stir with a whisk until thickened. For me, it took about ten minutes.

Remove from heat, and stir in butter and vanilla.

Pour into baked pie shells.

Let cool for about 15 minutes while you make the meringue.

For the Meringue:

3 egg whites
6 Tblsp. sugar
light pinch salt
light pinch cream of tartar

Make It:

Beat egg whites on high.

Add light pinch of salt, light pinch of cream of tartar.

Continue beating, adding sugar 2 Tblsp. at a time.

“When egg white will stand in peaks, pile on pie.” I recommend using small spoonfuls, which I did not know to do. When I spread my big glops out, they lost a little oomph (technical terms obvi).

Cool on the counter for about 20 minutes. Then, let pie set in fridge for at least two hours.

*It’s Worth Noting…

It’s worth noting that I hardly ever make the meringue. In our house we favor whipped cream. Choose the fluffy white topping you prefer–either is delicious!

TGIF!

Hello & Happy Friday! Here are a few fun (random) links that I gathered from around the interwebs this week.

Luke Edward Hall–”the young British aesthete”–has become a hero as of late. He wrote a lovely piece for this month’s Lonny all about his favorite things, and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll fall hard and fast for his style. Check out his website where you’ll find a shop as well as his “journal,” a blog full of inspiration. He also has a few prints up on Katie Armour’s Buddy Editions that are definitely worth a look.

As a lifelong Disney devotee, I was thrilled when a friend sent me this fascinating video of four Disney artists perfectly exemplifying: “You do you!” (Also, The Art Spirit is now on my reading list!)

Lulu Miller, co-host of Invisibilia, spoke to Creative Mornings DC six weeks before her podcast (a favorite of mine) premiered. The topic for the morning was “chance” and her title was pretty perfect (“Catapulting Chance into your Stupid Head”) as was her talk.

John Oliver talked about U.S. Territories on Last Week Tonight and blew my mind a little bit.

If you have any favorite links from around the interwebs this week, tweet me!

Happy Friday!

Good Morning

This morning, I took a walk around downtown Knoxville before driving out to the office because it was just too darn pretty to be inside all day. It made for such a good morning. The little guy above is in the window of Knox Mason-isn’t he cute? There were beautiful textures in the clouds, on the buildings and the rooftops so I couldn’t resist sharing.

Kitchen Storage Ideas

In the eight years since we moved into our home, we’ve discovered a few things about how we use our kitchen that changed the way we laid things out when we renovated. So today I thought I’d share a few kitchen storage ideas.

1. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

If your momma was anything like mine, this is something you’ve heard your whole life. Nowhere is it more important than in the kitchen! We were ruthless in cleaning out old utensils and pans that we never use. (Disclaimer: We still have more than we need. Don’t be all judge-y. When you come to a party and eat off adorable china rather than paper plates, you’ll appreciate my obsession with all things “kitchen.”)

Pay attention to where you put things. We’d had the same layout for the eight years since we moved in and, I’ll be honest, some placings just didn’t work. Why didn’t we change them sooner? There’s no reason to dig through a drawer to find a hot pad when smoke is filling your kitchen and the lungs of 4 guests. Have those hot pads within reach of the stove!

The spice rack* in the picture below? Lifesaver! I prefer to keep my spices in alphabetical order, but we had so many shoved in a cabinet that it was still impossible to find anything. So one day Husband built this beauty! Game changer.

A place for everything also cuts way back on clean-up time. It’s so much easier to unload the dishwasher when you know the exact space in a drawer that particular spoon should fill.

2. What makes for a pretty display?

We used to shove all of our towels in a drawer. Now, you’ll find them colorfully filling a basket in the new shelf that Husband added. Whoever installed our top kitchen cabinets had obviously thought this through as well. There’s a lip on the back of the large bottom shelves where plates can be displayed to add a little color,. There are also little hooks to store tea cups or, in our case, measuring cups and spoons for easy access.

Finally: jars. We use jars* for storing everything from salad dressings to all-purpose flour. It’s nice to have everything accessible for an afternoon filled with baking, but it also just adds a nice feeling of ‘home’ to surround yourself with your most common of ingredients.

3. Use old things.

I have always been an “old soul,” and perhaps that is somewhat responsible for my obsession with old things. But it’s also just practical: old things were beautifully designed and, in many cases, were made better than the newest stuff on our market. So find old things from your grandmother or go estate sale-ing on a Saturday and then use them! In our kitchen, you will find clothespins in the coffee tin, crackers in the cracker tin, and a silver dish to hold all our soaps and sponges.

*When storing spices, oils, or any baking ingredients, it’s best to keep them out of direct sunlight. So pay attention to where the light falls in your kitchen before deciding on anything permanent.

What are your favorite storage solutions?

The Kitchen Renovation: Evolution of a Home Pt. 5

Last week when Husband was traveling, I woke up early one morning to find the light was perfect in our kitchen. So I grabbed my camera to capture a few of the moments while I cooked breakfast. I decided it was the perfect excuse to finally share pics of our kitchen renovation.

If you don’t know anything about our house, it was built in 1935. You can read about the history of the home here or see pictures from before we bought the house in this post. (Please note the strawberry contact paper as I spent hours getting that stuff off the walls!) When we moved in, we painted the house a classic palette using lots of blues with red accents. It wasn’t very ‘us,’ but it definitely did the trick.

(Before) The Kitchen Renovation | Hannah & Husband

A couple before pics. (See more of our house circa 2006 here.)

Then last year, we decided to move (we didn’t), so we thought we should redo the kitchen. While this may seem counter-intuitive, you should know that one of the only rooms in your house that you can actually invest money in and expect to get it back at selling is the kitchen. A nice kitchen is a must-have on virtually every home buyers list, but it’s such a big investment, not to mention a pain to have that room torn up, that most buyers will never want to do the work themselves.

Homeowner Tip: If you can redo it yourself, update the kitchen before you put your house on the market.

So we went about drawing up a simple plan. We were lucky for two reasons:

1. Husband was able to do the work himself because he was doing contract work from home at the time and could make his own schedule. This saved money but also insured that we wouldn’t have a group of strangers in our home that we had to nag about a timeline.

2. We bought new appliances in 2006, which majorly cut back on our costs. (Our biggest expense was the countertops.)

The Kitchen Renovation | Hannah & Husband

By far the scariest moment of this renovation was cutting the hole for the sink in that gorgeous piece of butcher block.

We ended up making a total of 6 updates to the kitchen:

Butcher block countertops (We get a lot of questions about these, and I’ll talk about caring for them later this week.)
A new undermount, single bowl sink
Painting the walls and bottom cabinets (inside and out)
Adding a tile backsplash
Shelves with a small countertop on the other side of the range
Under-cabinet lighting

TGIF!

TGIF, y’all! Happiest of Fridays to you and congratulations on making it through this wacky week! Our week has been filled with video shoots, traveling trunk shows, and temps ranging from the 20°s to the 70°s. Good gracious! Anyway, here are a few links from around the interwebs to help you kick back and get ready for the weekend.

Click here to check out Joanna Goddard’s beautiful Brooklyn home.

There are two blogs that I check every single day. They’re the ones I’ve been reading so long that I can’t remember when I actually found them. The first is Love Taza and the second is A Cup of Jo–both are about amazing women, wives, and mothers who reside in New York City. I love how the internet has made the world feel so much smaller that you can read blogs, peek inside bloggers’ homes, and really feel like you know these women and a little about their lives. Well, Joanna Goddard (creator of A Cup of Jo) recently moved to Brooklyn, and this week she showed off her lovely space. I loved reading about how she chose colors and what pieces meant a lot to her. Definitely check out the full tour here and, if you’re anything like me, go a little Pinterest-crazy with ideas for the future.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced The Artist Project this week, and I cannot wait to watch the season. You can watch the teaser here.

Have you seen @shoesofnyc on Instagram? Follow immediately.

Sephora just announced its own version of Amazon Prime called: FLASH. For $10 you can get free two-day shipping for a year. I may never have to step foot in a mall again.

Have you been reading the “Women at Work” series in The New York Times? Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant have some thought-provoking things to say about women in the workplace (no shocker there) and also some really great research to quantify what they’re saying.

“To make gender parity a reality, we need to change the way we advocate for it. The usual focus is on fairness: To achieve justice, we need to give women equal opportunities. We need to go further and articulate why equality is not just the right thing to do for women but the desirable thing for us all.”

What to do with Leftover Pot Roast

Growing up, pot roast was a staple at our house. My mom frequently had a roast simmering in the kitchen during those weeks of winter when the grey seems to drag on for ages. Well last week, during all the snow and ice, I decided to make an eye of round roast for the first time. It was delicious and tender, and there were plenty of leftovers! Since it’s just the two of us, and we didn’t feel like eating roast for a week, we tried a couple easy things that turned out to be super yummy. So if you’re wondering what to do with the leftover pot roast you made during the last bit of icky weather, I’m going to suggest leftover pot roast pasta.

What You’ll Need:

2 Tblsp unsalted butter

1/3 large red onion

1 Tblsp sherry

1 Tblsp AP flour (+ 1 Tblsp on the side)

1 cup red wine

1 cup baby bellas, chopped

1 cup beef broth

thyme

leftover pot roast

What You’ll Do:

Boil your pasta to al dente. We used our favorite: trotolle.

Start by caramelizing your onions with butter in a medium-sized pot.

Once they’re softened, on medium heat: throw in a tablespoon of sherry, sprinkle in the tablespoon of all-purpose flour, and cup of red wine. Quickly whisk the mixture so that the flour doesn’t clump up. The mixture should begin to thicken.

Add your chopped mushrooms and beef broth. Stir to combine. If you need to thicken the sauce further at this point (I did), simply sprinkle another tablespoon of flour and whisk quickly until the lumps are gone.

Add the leaves of several sprigs of thyme.

Finally, throw in your small pieces (cut or shredded) of your leftover roast so that the meat has time to warm up but not to cook.

When your pasta reaches al dente, drain and throw in to the wine and beef mixture. Salt to taste, then serve with a bit of parmesan.

On day 3 of the leftover roast, Husband whipped up steak sandwiches for us after church.

In a small skillet with a bit of butter, he cooked belle peppers and onions.

Then, he added the leftover beef (again just to heat but not to cook).

When it was warm, he split the contents of the skillet right down the middle and put a slice of cheese on both to melt a bit.

We ate the contents on toasted buns, and it was delish!

And remember, if you’re getting sick of leftovers and all this winter weather, “This too shall pass.”

Talk to Strangers

Today I’m here to say it so that you don’t have to: your mother was wrong. It is, in fact, ok to talk to strangers. In fact, I think you should be doing it more!

I was recently telling friend about meeting up with a fellow twitterer (nope, still can’t say ‘tweep’) to have coffee. I knew we had similar interests and seemed to value similar things in life so I decided that we should be friends. (I was right!)

He shook his head and said he admired that I would meet up with someone I didn’t really know because there was a scant possibility we’d turn out to be kindreds. Which made me think: why in the world do I feel the need to do that? I’ve come to a few conclusions.

Found Picture

1.) Making friends as an adult is hard, you guys. Gone are the days of reaching for the same purple crayon in Mrs. Dove’s class and just knowing you’d be BFFs with this girl 4-eva.

“You like red red lipstick? I like red lipstick! Aren’t we the coolest?” probably wouldn’t go over well in a board room. But, in the age of the internet, it is really easy to find like-minded people. Blogland, twitter, and instagram have made the world a much smaller place. If you’d told me in high school that in ten years I’d be bonding with someone that lives 700 miles away over our favorite screwball comedies, I would have thought you were crazy. But guess what? That totally happened to me a month ago. A week before that I had lunch with a lady I’d met at an underground supper club, and we talked about everything from bespoke clothes to our attitudes about family.

Cultivate friends that share your interests regardless of where you find them! Odds are that if you have one thing in common, there are others. And having a diverse group can give you a lot of insight into different ways of life–and, in the age of the internet, different ways of communicating.

2.) I’m a story collector. Here’s the thing: everyone is human (with the exception of maybe Martha and Oprah). We all have a story. We all have a ‘thing’ we like to veg out on after work be it binge-watching netflix, reading Jane Austen, or having sex. (If you’re lucky: 2 out of 3) So this is your reminder that it’s totally worth looking up from your phone to talk to people in the elevator.

Let me tell you a story: When I first started with my company, I was a freelance photo-editor. One day, I hopped on the elevator with a well-dressed man and started up a conversation about how fabulous his sport coat was. It was patterned with beautiful stitching, and he was wearing a crisp white linen pocket square with a bright lavender trim–perfection. So we talked about menswear for a few minutes and then went our separate ways. At least a month later, a friend was giving my parents and me a tour of the building. I’d just been hired full-time as a designer and had never seen the 4th floor. As we walked past the biggest office, I noticed that the sharply dressed elevator man that had been so nice was Ken Lowe, the CEO of the company and the man who started HGTV.

You never know who you’re going to meet. Not everyone will be nice. Not everyone will end up a friend. But each one has an interesting story and something worth hearing. Sometimes we’re so distracted by our own mess or trying to play it cool in the corporate culture that we forget life is for the sharing! Talk to someone new, and listen to their story.

Found Picture

3.) I think my job on earth is to love people. I am (*shudders*) almost 30, and the only calling/direction/mission I am absolutely certain of, other than my calling to be a partner to James, is that I am here on Earth to love people. (I don’t always do a good job at that. Please see previous statement about humanity… Me ≠ Not Oprah.) But I do know for certain that making it your mission to value the people around you on this earth is one of the only missions worth pursuing. Tell someone if they look beautiful. Ask about their weekend and actually care about the answer. Listen to their story. Put love out into the world. Make a new friend. Talk to strangers.

Found Picture

Full Moon

A detail from “Anniversary”

Are you leery of the full moon? I never was until I worked in a preschool for a year. I swear, you can tell the phases of the moon just by watching the level of crazy in those little boogers’ eyes. (You know what I’m talking about. This trait is not limited to children.)

Anyway, last night I was feeling a little crazy myself and looked up to see the waxing crescent. The full moon will be here on Thursday. It made me think of this painting I did several years ago while dreaming of wintry nights and the full moon. It made me smile.

Anniversary 2009 | Full Moon on Hannah & Husband

“Anniversary” a painting I did for Husband in 2009

So tell me, do you believe in the power of the full moon? Husband thinks it’s a bunch of hokum, but I can’t help thinking there’s something to it.

How to Roast Vegetables (2 Ways)

Winter Sundays are made for roasting things–be they chicken or vegetables. On Saturday, I got a call from my mother-in-law asking me how I roast my vegetables. It’s so simple that it almost doesn’t merit a post, but if one of the best cooks I know called to ask, I thought I should share it with you! So let’s talk about how to roast vegetables two ways. It will make the winter veggies more tolerable until tomato season and you may impress your mother-in-law while you’re at it!

Preheat oven to 425°F

Rinse, don’t peel, your veggies.

Note: If you’re using beets, I suggest scrubbing them really well and then just trimming off any of the little hairy/rootish guys.

Roughly chop into pieces that are all roughly the same size.

Drizzle olive oil and toss the veggies a bit.

Add salt & pepper. You can stop here or add a bit of thyme for Way 1. (This is what I did with those gorgeous yellow beets.)

Roast at 425° for at least 20 minutes. Then, continue to roast until they are just the texture you prefer and are dark around the edges. (See above.) This can take up to 40 minutes but really depends on the size veggies you’re using.

Way 2 is a “gremolata.” A gremolata is an Italian condiment, but I came across it in one of my favorite cookbooks (which happens to be British): Veg by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The gremolata adds a brightness and savory quality that I can’t adequately describe, but I can promise it will smell delicious!

for the Gremolata:

handful of parsley
1 clove garlic
zest of one lemon

Now simply toss the gremolata with your roasted veggies.

Hannah and Husband

Main menu

Nannie’s Chocolate Pie

You’ll Need:

Make It:

For the Meringue:

Make It:

*It’s Worth Noting…

TGIF!

If you have any favorite links from around the interwebs this week, tweet me!

Good Morning

Kitchen Storage Ideas

1. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

2. What makes for a pretty display?

3. Use old things.

What are your favorite storage solutions?

The Kitchen Renovation: Evolution of a Home Pt. 5

TGIF!

What to do with Leftover Pot Roast

What You’ll Need:

What You’ll Do:

Talk to Strangers

Full Moon

How to Roast Vegetables (2 Ways)

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