peach recipes

Backyard peach sweet tea

August 24, 2016 by Edlyn

These late summer evenings pull at my heart strings in ways I’m unprepared for. As it gets darker earlier each day, I find myself walking out into the golden light to listen to chirping birds and traffic that sounds like the ocean. Just as the light begins to recede, it colours the tops of the trees in fiery hues of yellow and ocre mixed in with the darkest leaf greens. The ground is parched (I refuse to water the lawn) and the sky is blue. The temperature starts to drop after a day of heat and this natural A/C fills the rooms – that were stifling just a few hours earlier – through the backdoor and cracked-open windows. I am floating….

Summer peach spoon cake

September 15, 2015 by Edlyn

Before I say goodbye to a summer of crispy skin, happy hearts, mountain greys, achy joints, parched lips, windows wide open, bare feet, firsts, almost firsts, heartbreak, time travel, breakfast outside, sitting on recipes, gemmy friends and maybe finally making peace with the ocean between my feet and home, I must have cake.

It’s the same ocean that made these mountains, carried me over them, settled me down and let me exhale, truly exhale, the weight of starting over. The more I seek its power, the more resilient I become. I know this now. Cake helps too.

Summer peach spoon cake

I made this cake twice. Once was just like the original recipe (linked below) and the second time I changed it up by using a different flour, goat cheese and more spices. It’s more of a spoon/breakfast/mug cake. It’s soft – almost custard-like, does not maintain its pretty little shape on a plate and gives you all the joy of eating it in a cup in front of the TV. I love these kind of cakes.

Some notes: The cake tastes best on the day it’s made. I felt it got a little more wet the next day and the day after that. It still tastes good. I don’t like refrigerating cakes so I just covered the cake pan with plastic wrap and left it on the kitchen counter.

I used slivered almonds to make the almond meal, in a coffee grinder. You can either grind them into a flour or leave some almonds bits in the mix. I found that the almond bits gave the cake great texture.

You can soften the goat cheese by mixing it with a teaspoon or two of milk or cream.

Ingredients

Adapted from a recipe by The Domestic Front as seen on Food52

2 ripe peaches, cut into bite-sized cubes
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cardamom seeds
1 tsp + 1/2 cup granulated cane sugar
83 gms unsalted butter, softened
1 large egg, at room temperature
1/4 cup goat cheese/69 gms, at room temperature
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
152 gms/1 cup brown rice flour
58 gms/1/2 cup coarse ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt

Turn the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a 9 inch cake pan with parchment paper and grease it with butter. Dust the greased pan with brown rice flour.

Mix the cut up peaches with the spices and 1 tsp sugar in a large bowl and let it all sit covered on the kitchen counter for 2o minutes.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter and 1/2 cup sugar with a hand blender or wooden spoon until the mixture is light and fluffy and the sugar is almost all combined with the butter. Add the softened goat cheese, egg and vanilla extract into the mixture and whisk until they’re all combined.

In a separate bowl, mix the brown rice flour, ground almonds, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Add the flour mixture into the wet mixture in the large bowl and stir only until no streaks of flour remain. It might be thick and a little lumpy, but that’s okay.

Add the cake mixture into the prepared cake pan and spread it our into an even layer. Strain some of the juice released by the peaches into a cup. Pick out the peach bits (best part!) from the bowl and stick them into the cake batter using your fingers.

Place the cake pan into the oven and bake it for 10 minutes before turning down the temperature to 325 degrees F. Bake for another 50-60 minutes until the edges and top of the cake browns and a toothpick stuck in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Let it cool completely before digging in.

Long live Summer! Have the best Fall. It’s going to be great*, I hear.

Peach gazpacho

July 15, 2015 by Edlyn

A lot of thoughts come to me when I’m sweeping the floor. I wonder if I should push harder for a smaller home because laundry would be so much simpler. I’d be more inclined to have less. I always have been. I dream about throwing away all my clothes and shaving my head. I sweep the leaves, dirt and strands of my long black hair that lay lifeless on the kitchen floor. “Into the dust pan,” I say. Hair. It means more to me than it should. Us women are more than our hair. In my country long black, well-oiled hair is the trademark of beauty. I know I fall for it sometimes but I’m proud that I don’t let it seep in.

My feet have a layer of mud oven them; my toes remind me of days when “wear your slippers!” was all that stopped us from taking over the world. We washed our feet under the leaky tap outside before going back into the house. I am not wearing my slippers today. I still want to be those kids that could walk and run barefoot on rocky ground like it was air. They were free and I knew it even at that young age. I land on my whole foot. Each piece of gravel that digs into my arch hurts. I pretend that it doesn’t. (I don’t HAVE to wear slippers! YES.) Dirty feet mean more.

I think about my liver. Liver disease, swollen liver, chicken liver, Liv52..that red pill I took before going to school after that time my parents say I almost died. Maybe that’s why I can’t keep more than a few drinks down. I have images of my grandfather pouring himself a beer and sharing the other half with my mother, his daughter. I haven’t yet clarified this memory but I hope it’s true. Doctors classified my mother as “alcoholic” because she told them she drank once in a while. She wasn’t given a middle ground: “Now deal with the consequences.” Doctors…

I go back to excess and the rooms that have yet to be cleaned, the tables that have to be dusted, the pile of clothes that is just chilling on top of the washing machine. I’m not going to deal with this yet, I tell myself. I put away the broom, throw away the sprinkling of DNA-laced insecurities, doggy winter coats, dirt and pine needles.

There’s is zucchini and cauliflower in the fridge. I think about my mother sweeping the kitchen floor every night before going to sleep. Then I think about the house and life they built with us girls, dogs, cats and an assortment of fish and birds at different times. I pull out the cutting board and get started on dinner.

Peach gazpacho

I made this peach gazpacho after reading a Food52 article by Book Larder’s Lara Hamilton, in which she reviews a book called The World on a Plate by Mina Holland: “She mentions that Andalusians make big jugs of gazpacho that they drink all summer. So the next time our Seattle temperatures get too high, I’ll be pairing these two dishes, getting into the kitchen in the morning when it’s still cool, and letting my fridge do the work.”

After reading it while sitting at a small bakery in the International District in Seattle, I thought to myself: “What a bloody brilliant idea!” I’ve been holding off buying tomatoes for a while because of this silly notion that I need to be patient and wait for my own to grow. It’s ridiculous, I know. What I did have were the best looking peaches, raspberries (that I rarely buy because they always get smushed), and blueberries that I found growing outside in the garden. It’s a wonderful way to use stone fruit without doing very much with it. If you look up “peach gazpacho” on the internet, you are bound to find many other recipes but I like to think I made this up out of pure necessity. I only looked it up after I made it. I loved it. And I got to keep it in the fridge in a big bowl for a few days of summer until the tomatoes come around. Patience. 🙂 This kept well in the fridge for 3-4 days. I believe the vinegar + lemon juice helped a lot with the preservation. Stir it well if you’re eating it at a later date.

Edit: Here’s some more information about gazpacho. I like cooking from other cultures only if it helps me learn a little bit more about them through their food. Consider me better informed.

Ingredients

1 kg or 2 lbs ripe peaches, seeds removed and diced into large chunks
1/2 cup basil, coarsley chopped
3 tbsp red wine vinegar
Juice and zest of 1/2 a lemon
1 big pinch of Kosher salt (I use my index and middle finger to pick up the salt)
A handful of raspberries, blueberries and baby basil to garnish + A crack of fresh pepper, to serve

Place the peaches in a large bowl and add the basil, wine vinegar, lemon juice + zest to it. Cover the bowl and let the peaches sit on the counter-top for 2-3 hours.

Add the contents of the bowl into a blender along with the salt and blend on high until it has been pureed to a thick, soupy consistency. Strain the liquid through a fine mesh sieve and pour it back into the bowl. Chill for 30 minutes to an hour before serving it up.

Add chopped or whole berries, tender basil leaves and a crack of pepper on top to serve.

SoLetsPigOut: Cider-poached peaches with whipped ricotta

July 25, 2014 by Edlyn

Hi!

Before I put myself in social situations, I like to imagine myself in them. I think about what I’d say more than I bother about what I’d wear. I try to figure out what I would say should certain subjects come up and never once do I give myself credit for my ability to actually hold my own in a conversation.

Truth is, I’m so good at it. I know things…so many things. Sure, not all the things I know are on a scholarly level but I can talk without once saying the phrase “that documentary on Netflix”. For all the things I don’t trust myself with, food isn’t one of them.

YES! I can talk about food, say all my favourite foods in order of importance (idli-sambar is #1, just so you know) and talk about the things I’d like to make if only those magically-appearing dishes would do me a favour and not show themselves for a while. I love food, I love eating and I love reading about food while eating it. In short, it’s right up my alley. And guess what?! There are so many who are just like me.

Yay. #Soletspigout. A crazy creative food blogger duo (her and her) decided that it’s summer and what the heck?! Margaritas! But once that was done, they put together a virtual potluck, where we sort of don’t hangout in person but we pretend that we do and make fooooods that we want to stuff our gobs with.

Which makes me wish I could be sitting around with a bunch of food-loving hippy dippys in the summer at a giant potluck. Now see, I could find a million things to talk to them about.

Mostly cake.

PS: I still miss my baby cat very, very much. If you knew her, you’d know she’d run right away from (un)complicated cat-situations. For example: Touching, approaching her, touching and other human behavioural tendencies we impose on our pet cats. This post is me letting her be. She was always her own cat. They usually are…but she was me and I will be fine.

In Goa we wait for it to be mango season but we don’t very much care for the humidity that accompanies it. Fruit of every colour exists just to cool us all off. For every second we step out of our homes, there exists the sweetest watermelon just for us. Grapes, yes please. I thought, what better homage to summer with Washington’s fruit trees being oh so generous right now. Peaches (and you might see a few more varieties of stone fruit in my pictures) were my fruit of choice and again, I wanted to simplify this dessert so I wouldn’t have to waste the beautiful day outside. These long hours of light are precious, it would be silly not to bask in them.

For the whipped ricotta

Adapted from Bon Appetit

Ingredients

1 cup whole milk ricotta cheese
85 gms (3 oz) cream cheese, softened and at room temperature
3 tbsp honey

Using a whisk or a hand blender, mix together all the ingredients in a small bowl until smooth. Store in the refrigerator until ready to serve with the peaches.

For the poached peaches

Ingredients

4 large ripe peaches
1 3/4 cups semi-sweet apple cider (I used this brand but you can sub Moscato or any other sweet white wine)
2 tbsp honey
1/2 tsp pure vanilla extract
Fresh bluberries, to garnish
Powdered cane sugar, to sprinkle on top

First, you will need to peel the skin off the peaches. Fill a pot with water that would submerge the peaches. Prepare an ice bath while the water is heating. Once the water has boiled, take it off the flame and place side-by-side near the ice bath. Dip one peach at a time into the hot water with the help of a slotted spoon, taking care not to burn yourself. Let them sit in the hot water for 10-15 seconds and then spoon them into the ice bath to cool off. Remove from the ice and at this point, the skin should peel off easily. Set peaches aside on a plate.

Place a large skillet on medium heat. Pout the cider, honey and vanilla extract into it. Heat gently until all the honey dissolves. Once it’s all combined, spoon the peaches into the liquid, with the heat still on low. Put a lid on the skillet and let the liquid simmer for 15 minutes. During the process, keep turning the peaches and spoon the liquid over them to keep them constantly absorbing the flavours. After about 15 minutes, take the peaches out of the liquid and place them on a plate.

Keep cooking the liquid, now on higher heat until it reduces and turns into a syrup. Pour the cider syrup into a small bowl.

You can serve the peaches cold or warm. On a dessert plate, spoon some of the whipped ricotta and place the peach on top. Drizzle with cider syrup and sift powdered sugar on top. Serve with other fresh fruit.

Check out all the other amazing #SoLetsPigOut recipes on So…Let’s Hang Out and on The Pig & Quill. There are also fun fun giveaways.

Happy potlucking!