Chef Debbie Wilson Berment The Sagajo Experience

Arroe Collins Unplugged and Totally Uncut

It wasn’t long before Debbie Wilson-Berment discovered that the kitchen was where she wanted to be. As a young girl growing up in Trinidad and Tobago, she would often help her mother, Alma, an accomplished and award-winning chef, prepare family meals, as well as dishes for her mother’s catering clients. By the time she was 16, Wilson-Berment, who is known professionally as Chef Sagajo, had clients of her own and a steady stream of requests for the beautiful special occasion cakes she made. You’ll find more than just sweet treats (but you can find those, too) in Chef Sagajo’s first cookbook, THE SAGAJO EXPERIENCE: Recipes for Lifestyle & Entertaining (Virago Global Publishing, February 14, 2024). She goes beyond a cookbook, showing you how to create moments, not just meals—a feeling she learned from her mother and continued with her family. You will find page after page of easy-to-follow, yet elegant, recipes, but she extends her culinary canvas beyond the plate. She offers suggestions about other ingredients that make meals memorable, such as the settings you choose, the stemware you use, the flowers you display, the styles (formal or informal) you create, the wines you select and, most importantly, the people you choose to gather around the table. She provides an amazing smorgasbord of delicious menu ideas (with accompanying recipes) for some of life’s more common gatherings, such as family dinner, lunch (or tapas) with friends, breakfast in bed and those special occasions when you pull out all the stops with a menu that includes beef brisket, whole roasted red snapper, roasted duck, spatchcock chicken and Chilean sea bass. You can also find tips on food and wine pairings and a helpful “In My Pantry” guide, which lists all the ingredients that you will need. Her recipes and tips for entertaining are easy to follow whether you are a seasoned chef or an aspiring cook. Beautiful, eye-catching photos throughout the book bring the meals to life, as well as the family and friends who gather around her table, including her husband, grandchildren and three children, Sasha, Gabrielle and Jonathan. (Her children are the inspiration behind her professional name and brand. Sagajo--pronounced sah-ga-joe—is an acronym from the first two initials of each of her children’s names.) Since that early start in her mother’s kitchen, Chef Sagajo has gone on to a successful career as a private chef, a pastry chef, a culinary educator and now, an author. Her dishes reflect the rich Caribbean flavors of her early roots along with the cooking traditions she learned while training at top culinary programs in the United States. She calls her style Caribbean meets Mediterranean. She hopes her recipes will inspire others to gather, entertain with joy and adopt an approach to life that has long guided her personal and professional path: “Life is meant to taste and celebrate.”

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