Meet Sabina Säfsten

The first time Sabina remembers making a huge kitchen mistake, she was 13.

Her siblings and parents were outside in the garden and the orchard doing chores and it was her turn to clean the house. She looked at the flats and flats of fresh, warm raspberries from the raspberry patch and — naturally — decided to make a pie, instead of doing the dishes.

She had never made a pie before, but something told her she could figure it out. She was nervous. Her aunt was visiting and gave an incredible pep talk, then volunteered to take over the chores so Sabina could surprise everyone with the pie.

So, Sabina made the filling (and taste-tested a lot of raspberries). Though the recipe didn’t call for it, she added lemon zest to the crust and lemon to the raspberry pie filling (with a little extra sugar). She mixed the pie dough with ice-cold water and only till barely combined. Other than the lemon zest, she followed the instructions to a T. The kitchen smelled of warm raspberries, with a zing of citrus and a hint of sweetness from the sugar she sprinkled on the crust.

It was perfect.

She put it in the properly-preheated oven very carefully and shut the door. Then suddenly, she had an image in her head of the pie filling bubbling out from between the painstakingly-fluted, lemon-zest crust and spilling all over the hot oven coils. She quickly decided to put the pie on a cookie sheet to prevent such a mess. She very carefully pulled the pie out of the oven.

And dropped it.

The promise of delicious raspberry-citrus flavor on a flaky crust gave way to salty tears. Her aunt, luckily, was one of those aunts that give really, REALLY good hugs. After such a hug, they mopped up her very first pie off the kitchen floor. The little voice inside Sabina’s head told her that yes, the lemon zest had been an excellent idea. The exhilaration she felt putting that pie together was worth the pain of seeing it splattered. She decided she wanted that feeling again.

Many years later, Sabina has had that feeling thousands of times. She went to culinary school — but the best kitchen lessons still came from preserving, cooking, and creating new combinations of fruits and vegetables with her mom in their home in northern Idaho.

Sabina brings her love of garden-to-table cooking wherever she goes. She has cooked in restaurants, bakeshops, ice cream parlors, and catering kitchens, from prep cook to manager to sous chef to owner. She has designed and prepared recipes for everything from the humblest of preserves to a 14-pound bacon cake (that she is still absurdly proud of). She’s catered hundreds of events and taught dozens of cooking and gardening classes. Her interest in gastronomy, food systems, and culture has even led to guest-lecturing on the connection between apples and witchcraft in American lore at a local college. Ultimately, she continues to grow her passion for quality ingredients and the systems that bring them to our plates, parties, and palates.

But, though she laughs to admit it, she still has a little pang in her heart every time she sees a raspberry pie.