share! Everyone has a story, and we hope you will help us tell the tales of a variety of Des Moines cooks. Please send us your ideas. Tell us the names, contact information, and a little about your cooking friends. Send to Recipes@DesMoinesCooks.com. one of virginia's classic recipes: Apple Crumb Pie The veteran baker makes between 200 and 250 pies each holiday season. That’s in addition, of course, to batches and batches of cookies, breads, and other goodies. She has done the math and knows that it takes 240 pounds of apples to turn out 106 pies. Other ingredients include 20 pounds of Crisco, 60 to 70 pounds each of flour and sugar, 25 pounds of stick Imperial Margarine, and a couple large containers of cinnamon from Sam’s Club. Virginia’s Piecrust 3 1/2 cups flour, sifted with 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 to 1 1/2 cups Crisco shortening  10 to 12 tablespoons cold water 1tablespoon vinegar Sift flour and salt. Add shortening, using a pastry blender; blend until mixture resembles oatmeal. Add water, 1 tablespoon at a time. Mix with large fork. Handle as little as possible. Form into a ball and cut into 4 sections. Makes four 9-inch crusts. (She says, “I use 8 3/4-inch foil pans. If you are making 8-inch crusts, use a little less flour. Roll out crusts, place in pie pans, crimp the edges, and place in freezer. I let them freeze before putting them in a plastic baggie.”) Apple Crumb Pie 1 piecrust apple mixture: 4 to 6 Granny Smith apples, depending on size 2⁄3 cup sugar 1 rounded teaspoon cinnamon (a flat teaspoon is not enough, and a heaping teaspoon is too much) 1 heaping tablespoon flour topping: 1 cup flour 2⁄3 cup sugar 6 tablespoons stick margarine (I use Imperial) Heat oven to 450°F. Peel and slice apples into the crust. Combine sugar, flour, and cinnamon. Mix well and sprinkle over apples. Using a pastry blender, combine topping ingredients and spread over pie. Bake 10 minutes at 450°F, then reduce to 350°F and bake 50 more minutes. Makes one pie.

When most of us talk about “starting our holiday baking,” we couldn’t hold a candle or a double oven to Virginia Olson of West Des Moines. She makes between 200 and 250 Apple Crumb Pies each season. Many, of course, go to friends and family, but most of them go to associates of her son, Mike Olson, of Urbandale, a real estate appraiser who gives out the pies as his holiday gift to clients. Mike buys the ingredients and pays his mom for her time. (“I use it to buy my holiday gifts,” she says.)   “Trust me. People literally beg to be on the pie list,” says the proud son, who launched the pie tradition about eight years ago. Virginia, 81, didn’t just come to the baking arena. As one of seven in her birth family in South Dakota, she picked up the secrets and nuances from her mother. She herself has two sons, two daughters, and nine grandchildren, all in the Des Moines area, so she never learned to “cook small.” A former teacher and widowed for 32 years, she also used to own a small real estate company. Virginia went back to work at Principal Financial Group at age 59 and retired at 77. No doubt, for selfish reasons, her colleagues there were saddened when she left. Not only would they not work with this delightful woman on a daily basis anymore, but they would miss her daily treats: Monday, chocolate chip cookies and pumpkin bread; Tuesday, strawberry bread; Wednesday, poppy seed bread; Thursday, banana nut bread; and Friday, zucchini bread and brownies. She baked every evening for her work friends. After retiring, she started baking goodies for the Village Bean, a coffee shop in the East Village. And she holds her chocolate chip cookies up to the so-called “Obama Cookies,” which became popular locally and nationally with election workers and cookie lovers. “I have held several taste tests, and mine have won,” she says with a grin. For the holiday pies, she orders 400 pounds of Granny Smith apples from Dahl’s on Ingersoll. She shops around for the best prices on other ingredients, such as dozens and dozens of eggs and pound after pound of stick Imperial Margarine. With a single oven in her condo, she bakes pies two at a time. “I start on Thanksgiving and bake 16 to 20 pies each day.” She buys plastic bags and pie boxes for delivery, and Mike delivers them fresh the day they are baked. Yes, she uses an apple peeler and is proud that the cores and peels are recycled. Oscar, a pot-bellied pig owned by a friend, is the lucky recipient. Daughter Julie Brandt of Des Moines, Virginia’s youngest child, admits to being a nonbaker. “Why would I? I use her ‘revolving door’ to pick up goodies for friends.” Julie says she recently spent $35 to send by overnight delivery a bunch of her mother’s cookies for a friend’s birthday gift. Needless to say, the friend was delighted.

Julie took some of Virginia’s pies to an election party last fall. “Before I got there, the host kept billing these as the best pies in Des Moines. One couple there was skeptical because they knew of local pies they considered to be the best. It turns out it was my mother’s pies they were talking about, too.” If Virginia’s maiden name, Floren, seems familiar, well, yes, it is. Her oldest brother, the late Myron Floren, was the accordionist on the Lawrence Welk Show. She points out in a cookbook she wrote, Break an Egg, that if you weren’t musical in her family, it was important to find another skill. In her case, it was the three Rs: Reading, ’Riting, and Recipes. She also wrote a book that was an homage to her famous brother. For the wedding rehearsal dinner of one of Myron’s daughters, Virginia even went to California and made 12 pies for the meal. Plus, her wry humor comes out often—she loves to create poems for many occasions. Cookingwise, she covers the world. She is known to make a mean Italian lasagna, quiche Lorraine (French) for Christmas brunch, empanadas (from living in Chile for a year), and a sacred delicacy of her Norwegian heritage, lefse. Everyone else loves Virginia’s baking, but what does she get for all her hard work? “I bake, and everyone loves it. That’s my reward.”