Jeanne Kelley

strawberry rhubarb pie

Even though Angelenos enjoy cookouts year-round, tradition (and marketing) tells us that Memorial Day weekend kicks off the official outdoor cooking season. What better way to celebrate the beginning of summer, end a barbecue, and to mark a holiday originated to commemorate fallen civil war soldiers, than with pie?

The perfect late spring/early summer, old-fashioned pie is definitely filled with strawberries and rhubarb. Rhubarb is one of those weird vegetable-cum-fruit plants that, despite being delightful, can't help but come off as a little archaic -- it has toxic leaves, after all. But pair the long pink stalks with strawberries and you've got a sublime combo. Rhubarb gives body, texture and earthy tartness to strawberries. Strawberries lend color, juice and sweet floral fruity-ness to rhubarb.

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amazon.com

Those summer berry and fall holiday pies may get all of the seasonal baking attention, but spring really is the ideal time to Pie It Forward, isn't it? There are those rainy weekends best left to indoor dough rolling, the partly cloudy ones that aren't quite ready for berry picking outings, and those between-seasons sort of days when you really need a slice of Yin Yang cheesecake (in matcha tea and mango form, p. 132) to pull it all together.

Or, should you be more of a tart, torte or galette weekend baker, Gesine Bullock-Prado's new cookbook has plenty of blueberry brown butter and macadamia-coconut-caramel ideas -- even a few savory ones like potato sausage pie and Bavarian calzones filled with chicken, Camembert cheese, lingonberry preserves and aioli with a touch of maple syrup (!) for an added sweet kick.

Yeah, in case you're wondering, Bullock-Prado runs a lot of marathons. And yes, Sandra Bullock is her sister (A Hollywood pie diet! Now that would be fun).

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If nations were built on the Principles of Pie -- flaky crust, freshly made filling, everything baked with dedication and love -- we'd likely have a more contented, albeit fatter, populace. Until then, there's Republic of Pie, a newish North Hollywood cafe.

Open since mid-January, the cafe is spacious, warm and welcoming. There are small tables in front for those who want to write their masterpiece and a more open, convivial space in back with a bookshelf and couches for those who merely want to pretend they're writing their masterpiece. This is the kind of cafe where one comes to pen Cannibal!: The Musical (jazz hands, everyone!) or a biopic of an obscure Arctic explorer, not the live-action adaptation of Hot Wheels.

Republic of Pie has Handsome Coffee Roasters on tap and a makeshift stage for earnest singer-songwriter types. It even serves pie.

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Last year for National Pie Day, we made a list of the top 10 places to celebrate the holiday. It's still a great list, though it needs a few alterations: The Flying Pie Man has decamped from Los Angeles, The Pie Hole has opened its doors and we've fallen in love with the hand-pies at The Village Bakery's.

After a very buttery, flaky year, we've sampled all manner of variants on the classic pie, the most adorable of which are the pie pops at Some Crust Bakery, the Claremont shop whose bacon muffins and banana chocolate danishes we already adore.

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Just in time for holiday baking, pie-maker Michele Stuart offers Perfect Pies: The Best Sweet and Savory Recipes From America's Pie-Baking Champion (Ballantine Books, $25). Stuart opened the first Michele's Pies in Norwalk, Conn. in December 2007. Since then, she has won 26 National Pie Championship awards (mostly first place). In March 2011 she opened a second shop in Westport, Conn. She and her pies have been featured in The New York Times and on Good Morning America and the Food Network.

The 224-page tome, her first book, includes more than 80 recipes, including instructions for fruit, nut, cream, savory, sugar-free (sweetened with Splenda) and "party" pies, as well as a "fail-proof" crust recipe. Selections include a Pineapple-Mango Pie With Macadamia-Coconut Crumb, Chocolate Peanut Butter Dream Pie, Strawberry Glace Pie, Australian Beef Pie (savory) and Eggnog Pie (party).

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Easy As Pie

Update: 11/17, 8:30 a.m. Easy As Pie app is now available. You can download it here in the iTunes store. The original piece, published 11/16, is below.

Evan Kleiman takes her love of pies to a new level with Easy As Pie, an iPhone and iPad application that debuts tomorrow. We took a quick test drive of the app (without actually baking the recipes), which costs $4.99. It's easy to use, visually appealing and made us hungry for a sour cream plum pie.

Divided into categories like Crusts, Toppings, Specialty Pies, Pudding Pies and Evan's Favorites, the app includes downloadable and shareable ingredient lists, recipes for 18 pies, 4 crusts and 4 toppings, and videos that show the pies being made in real time -- with all the challenges and imperfections that can occur.

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Guzzle & Nosh

Coffee and lemon meringue pie at The Pie Hole.

Opened just last week in a gritty-chic corner of downtown L.A., The Pie Hole hopes to do for pies what nearby Wurstkuche did for sausages. That is, reinvigorate a staple dish, make it feel hip and modern, and, hopefully, fill the place to bursting with loft dwellers, office workers and architecture students. The difference: where Wurstkuche sources their sausages from outside vendors and throws them on the grill, The Pie Hole makes almost everything in-house and from scratch. Except for the coffee. They leave that to the pros.

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HungryHungryHippy

You know the story: Half the family wants one kind of dessert, the other half wants another. (And don't get us started on Aunt Mildred, who can never make up her dang mind.) Normally the solution is two pies, two separate factions, two warring gangs spooning sweets into their mouths around what's supposed to be a communal dining table.

No more. Today Reddit user MorningLtMtn hipped us to the Venn Piagram, a delicious and judicious melding of blueberry and strawberry that was actually created seven months ago by another Reddit user.

HungryHungryHippy tells us how it was done:

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S. Bonar

The Four Seasons serves Pumpkin Pie Pops at a Malibu fundraiser.

Cake pops are so over. Pie lovers should instead clap their flour-dusty hands for pastry chef David Laufer of the Four Seasons Westlake Village, who has concocted a particular portable dessert in the form of Pumpkin Pie Pops. Imagine oozy, not-quite-fully-baked pumpkin pie filling encased in a white chocolate sphere surrounded by toasted meringue. It explodes on your tongue in a mass of pumpkiny-cocoa buttery-marshmallowy goodness. If you stop at one, you must be some sort of advanced Tibetan monk with astonishing mind control.

The pops are not part of the hotel's regular dining menu, but can be requested for special events or occasions. Laufer (personal motto: "pastry is beautiful; make it look sexy"), a St. Louis native who has been with the Four Seasons for seven years and who specializes in over-the-top cakes, generously shared his recipe.

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Toast

In our conversation with Katherine Tidy, the food stylist on BBC Film's coming-of-age food comedy Toast, we spoke of a lemon meringue pie that presented Tidy with one of her biggest challenges on the shoot. "It was pivotal," says Tidy, "so I did lots of samples of it and took pictures of it and e-mailed them to the director [to make sure I had] the right color and height. [Director S.J. Clarkson] really wanted a very deep dish lemon meringue pie with A LOT of meringue on top." The final product, even by Tidy's own assessment, looked "kind of mad" but was "tasty." For the recipe, turn the page.

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