Roshan makes a strawberry pie...there goes the diet

It was quite an emergency. 

Right after I got the call I had to rush right over to my sister's house.

My sister Margie and I are very similar especially, when it comes to ordering food in restaurants. We end up wanting to order the same thing and this works out especially when we have lunch together. The only time it doesn't work out is when we are trying a new restaurant. We always say we will order what we like and the other will order something new and just share them.

What happens is one gets to try a bit of the other but in the end, we ultimately polish off our own dish, especially if its yummy! So the other one gets stuck with the new, sometimes-weird dish.

So when she called me, I knew it couldn't wait and that I would have to go to her right away.

In her house, sitting in a box

Was a fresh strawberry pie.

Now, we got so excited about it I forgot to take a picture of the whole thing, and if you see here, we already polished off half of it by ourselves (with her 10-year-old daughter Sophie just eating the glazed crusts).

Let me start at the beginning of our love affair with strawberry pie.

We used to live in a little suburb of Los Angeles and our Tita Carmen still lives there. After college, she moved to San Francisco in the early 90s and I moved to West Los Angeles in the late 90s. Around California is a little home-style restaurant/bakery named Marie Callenders, and it sells all sorts of pies that you can imagine.

Living there, I found out it would sell its pies for half-off at certain times of the year. My dad's favorite there was the blueberry cheesecake (he always tells the stories of loving the fresh blueberries but would forget the name of the bakery). They had lemon meringue, banana cream pie, chocolate cream pie, cheesecakes, you name it.

But my ultimate favorite was a seasonal pie: the fresh strawberry pie with just a little strawberry glaze. I would buy a pie and eat it for breakfast, straight out of the box.

It would last me three days.

So when Margie made that fateful call, I had to come right over.

The last time I had any was while we were on our family reunion in Hawaii for my mom and dad's advanced golden wedding anniversary. Margie took me to a place called Ann Miller, and here they had strawberry pies in mini versions with chocolate at the bottom of the crust. OMG!!!

She found out recently her friend from Pilates, Arlene, had a cousin who grew hydroponic strawberries and she bought some--and they were absolutely HUGE. She says her favorite way to enjoy strawberries is in a pie, and so she tasked her other friend from Pilates, Roshan Samtani, (who is super nice, a fabulously creative baker and ironically super skinny!) to make her a pie as fast as she can.

To roll it
And pat it
and mark it with cream
Put it in the oven for my sister and me!

It took Roshan 3 days to get the pastry right and research on the glaze. But voila....

This was so fantastic. The glaze was a little jelly-like in consistency but had good flavor. The strawberries themselves were juicy and sweet, and I love whipped cream on anything. The crust was flaky enough, not Marie Callender's flaky, but still good.

My favorite way to enjoy strawberries is by mashing it and adding milk and sugar (how mom used to make it,) fresh ones dipped in strawberries (preferably with champagne) and just like this one.

So like I said, there goes my diet this summer...

Roshan also makes cakes, cookies, homemade ice cream and a really special food for the gods that I haven't tried because I'm allergic to walnuts. Dessert lovers, call her but don't kill me if you gain weight.

Roshan
+632.631.7786
homemade.roshan@gmail.com