Ela Family Farms Peach Crips

For many years we have been eating the best peaches in Colorado from Ela Family Farms. Since I first found out about the farm, the family and the grower himself, Steve Ela.

Every year we anxiously wait until the first fruit of the season starts showing up at the market and to ensure we always get our fix, as they sell out pretty often, we buy a CSA - Community Share Agriculture in the spring, before the trees have even flowered, making the wait even more painful.

National Chocolate Chip cookie day!

Yesterday was National Chocolate Chip cookie day, well do I never need an excuse to make a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and if I did, this is it!
As I started the batch of cookies, I remembered a client who desperately asked why her cookies didn't work in Colorado, but always worked in California where she had lived her whole life. Well is the altitude! I said as we went onto how she could fix her problem.

Many think that pastry chefs have better recipes, I am sorry to burst anybodies bubble, we don't! We do however, have tips that many mistakes have taught us. Here are my non-failure tips to making this cookies at higher altitude:

1- Lets begin with this statement, I, personally, use the Toll House cookie recipe, keeping in mind that it must be adjusted for high altitude. No margarine here, full on butter in these cookies, if you are going to have a sweet little morsel why fill it with transfats?
The recipe call for 2 1/4 cups of flour which i change to 2 1/2, because baking in high altitude requires recipes to have more flour, less leavening agent and lower sugar. Having said that, the baking soda takes a small 1/8 tsp hit from the original 1 tsp, and the sugar lowers just a  tbsp each, brown and white.