Growing up in rural Baltimore County, the only girl in a family of five boys, Amy Langrehr literally had to grab for food. “As a kid, food wasn’t something I thought about,” says the alumni director at Friends School of Baltimore. “You just ate because you had to have dinner.”
Her 40th birthday trip to a friend’s home in Paris changed all that. During a drive to Burgundy, they stopped for a rustic French country lunch and her friend’s husband took photos of the food. (This was
before Instagram, mind you.) Eating, drinking and photographing her way through France left Langrehr with a hunger for more.
Today she lives her life in a sustainable way—buying local produce and even raising chickens in her backyard downtown. In this way, she is also carrying on the traditions of her grandparents.
“My grandmother was a cook who just made things up as she went along,” says Langrehr, whose grandparents ran Country Home in Harford County. “Homeless people would come off the train tracks and would work at my grandparents’ farm and stay overnight. Everything my grandmother made—buttermilk, cheese and butchered meats, anything they ate—they raised on the farm.”
The first recipe Langrehr created completely from scratch turned into her signature product: Charm City Cook salted caramel brownies available at Ma Petite Shoe in Hampden. “They will also be on the menu at Paulie Gee’s pizza when it opens later this winter” she says.
This First Friday, Nov. 1st, we will be sampling Charm City Cook's Salted Caramel Brownie for our Chocolate Happy Hour (6 - 9pm). See you there!
