Chiffa-wha? Chiffonade. It’s a fancy name for cutting herbs or other greens into long, thin strips. It’s literal French translation is “made of rags”. Sounds appetizing, right? Even so, it’s a nice little technique to have in your back pocket.

I mostly use chiffonade for basil (do chiffonade? make chiffonade? I’m not sure the right verbage here). It is nice for bruschetta, caprese salads, pasta, etc. I like it because it makes the basil smaller so it gets distributed better. And it looks pretty. Besides sometimes you need a dash of fancy in your life.

How to make chiffonade of basil

1. Stack your basil leaves. Put the bigger leaves on the bottom and smaller leaves on top. I’m using 5 leaves here, but you can do this with as many as you are comfortable working with.

2. Starting at the tip (non-stem end), roll the leaves

until you have a little cigar of basil leaves.

3. Hold the cigar down on your cutting board and cut thin slices from one end. Go as slow as you need to.

Keep cutting slices…

Until you reach the end of your cigar.

4. Voilá! Chiffonade. Now go fancify your dinner.

Have you ever bought a bunch of leafy lettuce with the intent of making a beautiful salad only to find it wilted in your refrigerator a few days later? What did you do? Did you:
A. throw it away then eat a pound of chocolate because you were so riddled with guilt? Or…
B. revive it and have your salad after all?
If you chose A, you are not alone. I am ashamed to admit how many bunches of lettuce, chard, kale, spinach, [insert your favorite leafy green here] have gone into my refrigerator only to die. But I have learned there is another way.

how to revive wilted greens or lettuce

I don’t remember where I read this, somewhere on the internets probably, but I’ve used this a few times with great success.

1. (Optional) Cut off an inch of the stem ends (this doesn’t always make sense like with some spinach, and I’ve found it isn’t always necessary. Kind of like cut flowers).
2. Place greens in a bowl or baking pan large enough to hold all of them. Cover with cold (not icy) water. You want all of the greens submerged if at all possible.
3. Put the bowl/pan of greens in the refrigerator overnight.
4. When the leaves look crisp, remove from the water and prepare as usual.

A couple of notes:

• If your greens are slimy in addition to wilted, I wouldn’t try this. Slimy can’t be revived.
• Don’t leave the greens in the water for too long. Overnight is really long enough. If you leave cut flowers in the same water for too long it can get gross, the same applies here.
• I’ve found sometimes the outer leaves don’t revive as well as the inner leaves (maybe I didn’t submerge all of them enough), so you may want to pull away some of the outer leaves before declaring failure.

What did I put in those jars?… Pie! That’s right, pie.

Several months ago, I was browsing Not Martha when I came across these tiny pies baked in tiny jars. Megan (Not Martha) used tiny jelly jars (4 ounce size) for her pies. I was so excited I went out and bought two dozen of the tiny jelly jars. They are so small and cute, I want to put everything in them. But I didn’t make pie. It wasn’t time. And the jars sat there.

Then, a couple weeks ago, I was catching up on Craft:, when again I saw pies in little jars, this time from Our Best Bites. Sara used the more substantial half-pint sized jars for her pies. After a short deliberation, I decided that would be a better size to work with because 1. you get more pie per jar, 2. smaller jars would be (potentially) more tedious to fill, and 3. you get more pie per jar. So I went out and bought some wide-mouth half-pint jars. But it still wasn’t time for pie. And the jars sat there.

Finally, last week it was time to bake pie. My pie crust trials left me with a bunch of extra dough. Awkward half portions that would only be good for mini-pies, or some sort of Frankenstein crust made of bits from each batch. So I grabbed the half-pint jars and made six mini-pumpkin pies and two pear-ginger (an experiment). And into my freezer they went, ready to combat pie emergencies at a moment’s notice.

Seriously, who doesn’t want a freezer full of single-serve homemade pies?

If like me, you decide you can’t live without tiny jar-pies, Our Best Bites has a great step-by-step how to (with pictures). And here are a few things I learned with my first batch:

• any pie crust will do (probably even store bought)
• any filling will do (at least any filling you normally bake)
• you don’t have to roll out the bottom crust, you can just mush it into the jars
• Megan (Not Martha) may be onto something with the 4 ounce jars… at least in terms of portion control…
• yay pie!

If it weren’t for cleaning out the inside of a pumpkin, I think I would cook with them more often. It takes me forever to scrape out all of the stringy stuff inside. This has made me lazy and I mostly use canned now. But we bought a few pumpkins for Hallloween decorations, and never carved them, so they have been sitting there taunting me… (I’m not sure how to cook big pumpkins though, I’ve only cooked with small sugar pumpkins – anyone have suggestions?).

Tonight I decided to go for it. Just cut the top off of a sugar pumpkin and dove in. I made a rendition of Ruth Riechl’s pumpkin “soup” or gratin or whatever you want to call it (it doesn’t really resemble soup, at least not the way I made it. Tasty though. Then again most things are tasty with enough melted cheese).

There I was cleaning out the pumpkin with a spoon and getting really annoyed with all the stringy innards. I nearly gave up, but instead went on a hunt for something better. I’m sure I am not the first person to do this, but I found that an ice cream scoop worked better than anything else I tried. It made short work of the rest of the pumpkin guts and I was happy to be moving on to the fun part of baking the pumpkin and toasting the seeds.

So there you have it: ice cream scoops, not just for ice cream…

A new batch of mini-pies are cooling in the kitchen right now. Once the taste tests are done I will share the results with you. I have four crusts in the test: all butter, butter + shortening (both of these are repeats from round 1), butter + lard, and Cook’s Illustrated fool-proof pie dough which uses vodka.

But for today, I thought I’d share a few tips about making pie dough. Many of these are common knowledge (among those who make pie), but now that I’ve made four different batches of dough in the last couple days I feel like I can add my two cents:

1. Keep everything cold. Especially the fats and liquid. Before I start measuring the flour, I like to put the water into the freezer so that by the time I am ready to use it, it is ice cold. Also, Alton Brown recommends putting your fats (butter and lard in his case) in the freezer for fifteen minutes before you use them. I did this for some and didn’t for others and didn’t see much of a difference as long as the butter was already cold.
2. Work quickly. This kind of goes with point 1 because the faster you work, the less likely it is for the fats to warm up. You want it to stay cold and solid. So I think the food processor is best for this for two reasons: 1. it is fast, and 2. your warm hands don’t touch it much. So if you don’t have a food processor, just keep everything extra cold or chill it after each step.
3. Relax. It is only pie dough. And if there are tears or if it crumbles, patch it together and do your best to hide it… chances are no one will notice.
4. Let your dough relax. Yep, just like you, your dough needs to chillax so don’t overwork it. Don’t take your frustrations out on it… if you’re frustrated, make pizza. Also, this is a good time to be a slacker… do just enough to make it work.

Finally, here are a couple of videos I put together as I made my pie dough. In the first one, I use a food processor, and the Cook’s Illustrated recipe (with vodka)… I like saying I used vodka in the pie crust…

• Cook’s Illustrated fool-proof pie crust via Serious Eats.

In the second video, for those of you who don’t have a food processor (I was one of you until last Christmas), I make pie dough using a pastry blender (one of my favorite kitchen tools), and the pie crust recipe from Good Eats that uses a little bit of lard…

• Alton Brown’s pie crust recipe