For fruit pies, fresh fruit always tastes better! But…If you can’t buy local then it is sometimes better to buy frozen, because frozen fruit is picked at the height of ripeness and frozen immediately sealing in the good flavor.
Colleen Sommers hasn’t always been a pie fanatic. But since starting her pie-making company Pie Fixes Everything 5 1/2 years ago, she’s fallen in love with everything about them.
Sweet or savory–pie fixes everything. Well, maybe not everything, but it sure makes most things, even the tough stuff, go down just a little easier. And you have an opportunity to help the Pie Fixes Everything founder and head baker, Colleen Sommers, affectionately called “Her Pieness” by her friends and fans to get through a challenging time.
Often when I visit home cooks and chefs for cooking demos, I may not get to sample the end product because the cooking time may be 30 minutes to an hour or more–depending on what’s cooking. Such, I thought, would be the case with the Apple Plum Pie Colleen Sommers, founder and head baker at Pie Fixes Everything, demonstrated for me one Sunday afternoon. I was wrong. Deliciously so.
When I visited Sagra Trattoria in Austin with my friend, photographer Jeff Stockton, Chef Gabriel Pellegrini whipped up a simple, yet incredibly delicious dish he called Roasted Tomato Spaghettata.
When I discovered that Sagra Trattoria in Austin, Texas grows the majority of the tomatoes and herbs that Chef/Owner Gabriel Pellegrini uses in the rustic Italian dishes he prepares, I knew I had to visit.
As a veteran chef and restaurant owner, the only thing new to Chef Gabriel Pellegrini’s recent resume is location, having recently moved from New York back to his native Texas to embark on his latest Italian restaurant endeavor, Sagra.
Gabriel Pellegrini, Executive Chef and owner of Sagra Trattoria in Austin, Texas offers a few suggestions for creating inspired cuisine by keeping it simple.
Benjamin Baker, Executive Chef at Travaasa Hotel and Spa in the Texas Hill Country, is a seventh generation San Franciscan who knows a thing or two about sourdough bread. In fact, he uses sourdough starter handed down through the decades to make his signature loaves and rolls.
Although making sourdough starter is basically very simple, a lot can go wrong–dumb stuff, really. And so the following tips are intended to help you navigate around some of the hazards associated with the care and feeding of sourdough starter.
