Cherry "Hand Pies"

The last pie, taken with Instagram (my SECOND helping)

Well.

Over the past few weeks I've had the occasion to cook a couple different times for our extended family, as well as some dinners for our little nuclear family, which has brought me to the idea for this blog.

For my mother-in-law's birthday, I grilled filet mignon, made a twice-baked potato casserole, and even made a gluten-free dessert especially for "LaLa" as we call her around here. The steak could have been a little more done, the potatoes were supposed to be served in the skins but I mangled them, so it turned into a casserole, and the dessert was pretty good.

For my parents and sister, I grilled one of my tried-and-true recipes, a Jamaican-inspired barbecued pork tenderloin (my mom made the side dishes).

My sister-in-law and I enjoyed another recipe I appear to have mastered, a baked salmon (I fixed an Uncle Ben's boxed rice side dish with this one), and for dessert--cherry "hand pies." More on these in a moment.

I need a new grill, some better grilling utensils, and some more practice with how to tell my meat is really done. I need some practice on creating pretty twice-baked potatoes. I need to branch out a bit.

But the "hand pies"--oh MY.

I got a pound of cherries on sale at Whole Foods for $1.99--that's cheap ANYWHERE for cherries, let alone at Whole Foods! The toddler loves fruit of any kind, and probably ate about half the pound herself (what a mess!) but I wanted to make sure we used them all up before they went bad. I found this recipe at FoodNetwork.com and discovered I had all the ingredients on hand, so I decided to go for it.

I only had about half the required amount of cherries, so I halved the rest of the ingredients--except I accidentally put in the original amount of cinnamon, so they were pretty cinnamon-y (but not in a bad way). I also burned a finger during the frying, but it was SO worth it.

I don't typically like cherry pie...but I think that's because I'm usually eating generic pie filling. I used Rainier cherries, so they were a deep, dark red, and I don't think I've ever tasted anything as glorious as those pies.

Other tips: put a brown paper bag under the cooling rack for easier clean-up of the grease. Try rolling the dough out between two pieces of plastic wrap for less mess and prettier pie shapes.

Put one in the win column, folks--this dish was great!