In Honor of Pie Day...

Tomorrow - January 23rd - is National Pie Day.  Tomorrow's observance is endorsed (and likely created) by the American Pie Council.  And yay for the whole concept of celebrating pie for a day, but January 23rd seems random, right?  Like do you think that all the important people at the American Pie Council got together in a conference room, wrote down some dates, threw them in a hat and then just pulled one out and decided to go with it? However National Pie Day came to be, we plan to be ready for it.  We put a lot of thought into how we should celebrate and really, it was hard to find ways to celebrate that fit with our personalities.  Automatically, we knew that we couldn't go for any bounce houses, face painting, crafting, games, sing alongs, or making one of our staff dress up like a pie and dance on the corner of Nifong and Buttonwood.  None of those things suit us very well and we wanted the celebration to feel authentic to Team PJP.

Enter the hand pie.

As I mentioned on the blog last night, a hand pie is a completely contained and portable pie that you can carry around and eat.  Or sit and eat.  Or talk on the phone and eat.  Or watch television and eat.  Or read and eat.  You get the picture.  And the true beauty of a traditional hand pie is that you can put pretty much anything you want inside of it, both savory and sweet.  (The list of ideas we discussed is a blog post in itself for another day.  Just know the words au jus were uttered.)

So today we tested a lot of variations on the hand pie.  We narrowed down our favorite ideas from the past week, went to Hyvee for the ingredients and got to work.  We really wanted to focus on the savory hand pies for tomorrow.  Thankfully, Team PJP was at full capacity with Sanae, Mitch, and Mac, and everyone was eager to taste.  That said, by 2 pm, we all had headaches and needed to lay down from eating a lot of random bites of food.

One of the hand pies I tested had horseradish in it.  Another had egg.  There was bacon, mushrooms, red pepper, and in general, a theme of THE MORE CHEESE, THE BETTER.  After choosing our top three favorite savory hand pies, we moved on to sweet pies.  We knew that adding any of our filling to a hand pie crust would be delicious...and we had already tried in several variations of fruit.  We worked on some ideas, like a Nutella hand pie, but Team PJP had divided feelings about so much sweet.  Or perhaps we were all just having meat sweats from our morning tasting and our taste buds had clouded judgment.

So listen, tomorrow is the day.  We are making hand pies all day in approximately a billion or so different flavors.  At $4 each, stop by for lunch, a snack, a surprise for your kids at school pickup, a box of 12 for your 4 pm Friday afternoon meeting that no one wants to attend, for really anything.  In the name of National Pie Day.