peach butter – SIMCHA FISHER

What’s for supper? Vol. 396: Season of mists and mellow soupfulness

Happy Friday! I was looking through my camera roll for this week’s food pics, and came across this image:

and smiled quietly to myself. Then I thought if I shared it, I really need to hunt up the source, so I searched for it on Facebook, which helpfully supplied this as the only hit:

I guess Facebook never heard of snitches get stitches.

Alternate joke:
. . .nah, never mind, I was gonna do a thing about misusing substances while shouting “I refute it thus!” and then breaking your foot, but in fact college was just too long ago.

(But actually the source is this funny lady on Instagram.)

Speaking of substance, I have lost six pounds in the last two weeks, by more or less adhering to the eating plan I outlined here. I’ve been up and down enough times to know that things could go south (or north, I guess) at any point, either because I sabotage myself or something outside my control happens; but dammit, I did lose six pounds. Usually I can lose four pounds and it doesn’t mean anything, but six pounds is enough to get my attention.

My secret weapon is neither GLP-1 nor cocaine, but gum. Because my big problem, when I’m trying to lose weight, is not really that I get hungry; it’s that my mouth gets lonely. So I give it some gum, and it works. This is humiliating for me because I’ve spent my entire adult life being absolutely horrible to people for chewing gum in my presence. Oh well. I’m just trying not to be an absolute cow about it, and if anyone wants me to apologize, I will.

Okay, that’s enough of that! Here is how we made our mouths less lonely this week:

SATURDAY
Salmon tacos or mac and cheese

I had already defrosted some salmon filets the previous day, but we had…something else, I don’t even remember.It was not a week worth remembering, as I recall. But I’m trying really hard to waste less food, so I patted the filets dry and sprinkled them with .. . I think salt and cayenne pepper? I don’t remember. Then I heated up a pan super hot with a layer of olive oil, and put them salmon on, skin down. I let it cook for probably four minutes and then flipped it over and cooked it for just another minute or so. Then I squeezed a lime over it. Turned out really nice! Not dry.

I only made four pieces because the kids that were home are not fish lovers.

I made a bowl of guacamole and shredded up some cabbage, which I set out like this and nobody said a thing about it

This is top tier food humor, but my talent is wasted.

So we just had really simple little tacos with the salmon, cabbage, and guac, with more lime

Nice.

SUNDAY
Cinnamon garlic chicken, roast squash and Brussels sprouts, hobbit bread; Rosemary olive oil cake with homemade ice cream

Sunday was Clara’s birthday, and she did the baking at her apartment and then brought it over here to finish. So I made the garlic cinnamon chicken I make at Passover

Jump to Recipe

and a big tray of roast butternut squash and Brussels sprouts. I drizzled them with olive oil and hot honey and sprinkled them with salt and pepper, and broiled them. Dinner ended up quite a bit later than expected, so I ended up scraping them into a pan and keeping them warm under tinfoil, but this wasn’t a bad thing! Just a bit more medey’d than usual.

Clara brought a giant, pneumatic loaf of bread to bake, which turned out lovely, very tender

and she baked the olive oil rosemary cake from Parsley and Icing. She put rosewater in the frosting instead of vanilla, and she decorated it with phlox blossoms.

NOTE: Perennial phlox is edible, but annual phlox is not!!!! Decorate accordingly, depending on whose birthday it is and whether you would like them to have more.

But it was such a lovely cake, and a great texture.

I was very pleased with myself because, a few months ago, I found a KitchenAid stand mixer on FB Marketplace for an amazing price. I believe it’s from the 90’s and works great, and it’s GREEN.

Well-received, as you can see, and obviously she will put it to good use! My own KitchenAid was a wedding present in 1997, and it was refurbished then, and it’s still going strong. A few years ago it needed oiling, and Damien put a new cord on it this year, but other than that, it’s been working away with zero problems. If you are thinking of getting a KitchenAid, I highly recommend a used one.

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to figure out when the decline that everyone is sad about actually happened, and it’s really hard to say. Some people are saying the newer models have a sacrificial gear that’s designed to break, to spare the engine, and it’s actually a cheap fix; but others are saying the whole design got nickeled and dimed and is just not the workhoree it once was. So, that was a paragraph without any actual information in it, sorry. Anyway, at very least, a used one will be way cheaper. My eyes really bugged out when I saw the price tag for a new machine!

Anyway, after dinner and presents, we had such a nice, happy evening, just sitting around yakking. Damien and I kind of sat back and let the kids talk, and it really warmed my heart to listen to them just enjoying each other’s company, talking about movies and candy and whatever. I sure like my kids.

Oh, I forgot about the ice cream! I made both kinds in the morning, which is a bit of a gamble because some ice creams don’t firm up enough in a few hours. They were on the soft side, but still scoopable.

I did one with almond, and I just did the Ben and Jerry’s sweet cream base (2 eggs, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 cups of heavy cream, one cup of milk) and I added a big hit of almond extract; then after it churned for half an hour, I mixed in a bunch of toasted almonds.

For the other one, I followed this recipe for cardamom ice cream with warm ginger drizzle. Sounds complicated, but it was really easy. The ice cream is just milk, sugar, cream, and ground cardamom. Then for the drizzle, you heat up a little syrup of white sugar, brown sugar, and water, and then you add the ginger and boil it for a while. I don’t have a microplaner, so I used the small holes on my cheese grater, and ended up with little nubbins of ginger which were actually really nice.

Both kinds of ice cream turned out great. I wished the ginger drizzle had been thicker, but the taste was fabulous.

I really enjoyed the cardamom ginger one. I might make it again and boil down the ginger syrup until it’s really thick, and swirl it into the ice cream before freezing it.

MONDAY
Aldi pizza

My car has gone crackerdog again, and Damien can fix it but the parts are taking forevvver to come, so we’ve been doing a lot of duck-fox-basket of corn maneuvers every day, with the extra added spice of one kid doing a ton of dental appointments before he loses his insurance, and another kid doing a wisdom tooth consult (where we learned that she has one lone third tooth deep down in her gums! Not a baby tooth or an adult tooth or even a mesiodens, but just a little bonus guy. I like to think that, in tooth society, this is the equivalent of a holy fool, which doesn’t have any obvious specific value, but you gotta think it’s there for a reason, so you just make sure you know where it is). Anyway, we had Aldi pizza.

Also on Monday, I was seized by a sudden urge to clean and reconfigure the refrigerator. I basically switched the vegetables, which were in the bottom drawers, and the condiments, which in theory were in the door but in practice were scattered all over the place, many of them lying on their sides with loose tops, which is the main reason I suddenly got mad and cleaned the fridge.

So here’s the new sich:

You can see that we have replaced the bottom door shelf with a PVC rod and some screws, but the middle door shelf also recently broke and I haven’t fixed it yet. The bottom drawers have been replaced with plastic tubs, and the bottom shelf has been replaced with a wire closet shelf. I’m proud of my ingenuity but furious at the people who design refrigerators.

I also moved the eggs to a low-clearance shelf, so people won’t be able to put heavy things on top of them; and I put the packaged meat and the cheese on separate shelves, so people will stop mixing them up (which leads to nobody being able to find anything, and more food waste).

It’s weird having the veggies on the door, but I am the main person who needs to be able to find and grab them, so it’s a weirdness I can deal with. The things that the rest of the family uses more often are easily accessible. I really think I’ve done it this time! I’ve designed a system so perfect, no one will need to be good. This might actually work, because it’s just a refrigerator.

Anyway, we got to the oral surgeon.

TUESDAY
Pork chops with peach butter, mashed ginger acorn squash, risotto

I got pork chops because they were irresistibly cheap, but I really hate cooking pork chops. It’s a mental block. I’m so afraid they’re going to dry out, and I’m gonna serve the fibrous grey mittens that haunted my childhood, I always end up messing them up even if I have a great recipe. Pork ribs are fine; it’s just the chops I have issues with, even if they’re cut thick.

But Damien took a kid to the appointment that’s like an hour away and I recorded a podcast with A Simple House, which was fun! So I got moving and made a pot of Instant Pot risotto, which everybody likes.

Jump to Recipe

It’s not the same as stovetop risotto, of course, which is magnificent but so much work. But it’s still really good!

And I fetched an acorn squash from the garden, cut it in half, scooped out the seeds, drizzled it with olive oil and sprinkled it with salt, and roasted it. Then I scooped out the flesh and mashed it, and then I added the leftover ginger syrup, and a little cardamom.

I am a golden god and it was the best mashed squash I’ve ever had. The chops, I sprinkled with salt and pepper and lightly roasted them and served them with peach butter.

A very lovely autumnal meal altogether, very mellow fruitfulness. Not a stringy mitten in sight.

WEDNESDAY
Peach-stuffed waffles

Wednesday Damien had promised to take the kids to a concert in Boston, and Elijah was at work, and that meant that the only people home for dinner were me, Irene, Benny, and Corrie. Waffle time!

I broke out the old Mary Gubser cookbook and made a double batch of waffle batter.

The kids requested chocolate chip waffles, which is fine with me; but I myself wanted peach. We had a small jar of peach pie filling I never used, so I buttered the waffle iron, put on a thinnish layer of batter, and then spooned some peach filling on that,

and then a little more batter.

Dang, they were good.

I was very pleased with myself, and just sat there making more and more waffles until I suddenly remembered I had an article due in the morning. I told the kids they could watch three episodes of something, and went off to write, and then reemerged at 10 PM to discover that they had turned the TV off after three episodes, but I hadn’t said anything about going to bed, so they did not do that. I may have shouted, “WHAT ARE YOU, STUPID?” and they may have shouted “YES.” (You can do this every once in a while, for a treat, especially if you’re all full of waffles. I also tell them they’re smart, just to keep them on their toes.)

THURSDAY
Chicken orzo soup, rolls

Thursday I finally faced the oyakodon recipe I have been planning to make for weeks. But the truth is, I had a giant turkey breast in the fridge, which I got because it was 99 cents a pound, and which I had defrosted because I don’t remember why. Oyakodon really needs dark meat, but the breast was already thawed, and I honestly couldn’t remember if people even like it, and I didn’t have dashi, and so on.

BUT, it was a foggy, drizzly day in September, so I made regular old cheater’s soup. I just chunked that whole breast in the Instant Pot with a lot of water, carrots, onion, celery, a little parsley, and some salt and pepper, and pressed the “soup” button. When it was done, I tasted it and hastily added a few tablespoons of chicken bouillon powder. I pulled out the turkey breast and shredded it and put it dumped it back in, added a small box of orzo, and simmered that for a while, and heated up some frozen rolls from Walmart, and man. It was a perfect cozy little meal for a rainy day.

I love orzo in soup. It’s so elegant and comforting at the same time.

Also, Cub Scouts got cancelled because of the rain, to my vast relief. I really loved signing up for Cub Scouts. This whole “going to meetings” nonsense has to stop, though.

FRIDAY
Regular Spaghetti

Regular! Regular! Regular spaghetti, pasta from a box and sauce from a jar. We love it.

A quick update on the comments situation: I didn’t fix it, but I made it slightly better, so you’re far less likely to get follow-up emails from Russians trying to explain arcane things about ferrous metals, or someone crowing, “your piece is highly educative and wonderful. More power to your elbow!” (If all spam were like this I’d let it go, but most of it is boring and gross.) Anyway, that’s where that stands, and I apologize if your inbox has been haunted because of my site!

And that’s-a my story. Middle Aged mom out.

Cinnamon garlic roast chicken

This is the chicken we usually serve at passover, but of course you can make it any time of year. Faintly sweet and nicely cozy, it's popular with kids and tastes good cold.

Ingredients

4-5 lb whole chicken
2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp cinnamon
5 cloves garlic, smashed

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 500.
Mix the spices together and rub them all over the outside of the chicken.
Stuff the cavity with the garlic.
Put the chicken breast side down on a rack and roast for 15 minutes.
Reduce heat to 450 and roast for another 15 minutes.
Turn chicken breast side up, baste with pan drippings, reduce heat to 425, and continue cooking for another thirty minutes or until temperature reads 180.
Let chicken stand 20 minutes before carving. Also can be refrigerated and carved later, to be eaten cold.

Instant Pot Risotto

Almost as good as stovetop risotto, and ten billion times easier. Makes about eight cups.

Ingredients

1 medium onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced or crushed
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground sage
3 Tbsp olive oil
4 cups rice, raw
6 cups chicken stock
2 cups dry white wine
1/2 cup butter
pepper
1.5 cups grated parmesan cheese

Instructions

Turn IP on sautee, add oil, and sautee the onion, garlic, salt, and sage until onions are soft.
Add rice and butter and cook for five minutes or more, stirring constantly, until rice is mostly opaque and butter is melted.
Press "cancel," add the broth and wine, and stir.
Close the top, close valve, set to high pressure for 9 minutes.
Release the pressure and carefully stir in the parmesan cheese and pepper. Add salt if necessary.

What’s for supper? Vol. 393: Everything continues to come up peaches

Hello everyone, I am 101 years old, I made my own birthday cake with peach cream and filling, I started decorating cakes from 5 years old, I love it, and I can’t wait to grow my baking journey!

For those of you who aren’t neck-deep in Facebook:

Happy Friday!

Today we officially cancelled our landline. If you were wondering which generation we actually belong to. It is one of the old ones. Like I said, I am 101 years old.

Kind of weird menu this week, due to (a) peaches and (b) the fact that I woke up, looked at our bank account, and was filled with an overwhelming desire to use up the food we already had in the house. Also (c) the oven wasn’t working most of the week. And (d) peaches.

SATURDAY
Leftovers and taquitos

Everybody agreed it would be okay to have leftovers once a week, as long as there are also taquitos. I can live with that! Lots of good food last week.

We had butter chicken, rice, sumac chicken, and taquitos. And it looks like some chimichangas, too.

Butter chicken just gets better (at least for few days), so no complaints from me.

That night, I made another big batch of peach butter with about sixty peaches,

loosely following this recipe.You blanch and skin the peaches, cook them for a while with brown sugar lemon juice, vanilla, and spices,

whir them in the blender, and then cook them down for (unlike what the recipe says) a few hours.

SUNDAY
Homemade waffles with peaches and peach butter; sausages

Sunday I woke up to this

but our family has gotten so teeny tiny that we all fit in Damien’s car anyway. After Mass, he put my spare on, and then, just to further increase his joie de vivre, I insisted we go over our finances for the entire month and see where the hell our money is actually going. I mention this because we actually identified about half a dozen expenses that were just plain stupid, and could be easily eliminated. Stuff like our internet service decided to randomly start billing us for a TV thing we don’t use, and Adobe thought it would be nice to get $36 a month from us just because, and yes, we have been paying for a landline and using it almost entirely to field recorded messages from the pharmacy. Anyway, probably you’re already doing this, but in case you’re not, I recommend it.

Then I made a bunch of waffles with some of the duck eggs that have been piling up in the fridge. I think I mentioned that the two young girls have started laying. It’s pretty easy to tell whose egg is whose:

The newest girls are Swedish Black ducks, and sometimes they lay white eggs, but sometimes not!

We are still getting tons of double yolks, which is cute, but confusing if you’re trying to remember how many eggs you cracked.

This is six eggs!

Here is the waffle recipe I use, from this cookbook by Mary Gubser.

Making homemade waffles always gets me a little nostalgic, because the cookbook and the waffle iron were both wedding presents. Coming up on 27 years of marriage next month! When we were first married, we ate tons of waffles because it was cheap and we were too young and dumb to figure out how to make money yet; but now here we are, over a quarter of a century later, eating waffles because the Lord in his mercy has preserved us from the burden of wealth.

But He has given us peaches! So I fried up a bunch of frozen sausages and served the waffles along with the peach butter I made, plus sliced peaches and maple syrup.

The peach butter was a little too cardamom-y by itself (not the recipe’s fault; I just wasn’t paying attention when I dumped stuff in the pot), and had almost a molasses-y taste, but together with the fresh peaches and the maple syrup, it was DIVINE. The perfect melding of late summer and early fall flavors.

MONDAY
Burgers and brats, chips, watermelon; Grilled peaches and homemade ice cream

Sunday was Labor Day, and we had a basic little cookout, just hamburgers and brats. The original plan was to grill peaches on the grill, but when it came down to it, using the oven seemed like a fine plan.

The new heating element still hadn’t arrived, but the top one, for broiling, still worked fine, so I just halved the peaches, poured melted butter over them, and sprinkled them with sugar, cinnamon, and a tiny bit of salt, and broiled them until they had a little color.

I had started vanilla ice cream in the morning (two eggs beaten, then 3/4 cup sugar beaten in, then two cups of heavy cream and one cup of milk mixed in, then put in the machine for half an hour — finally got it memorized!), and we all had peaches and ice cream.

Just lovely. Maybe next time I will make some pralines, but it was very nice as it was.

TUESDAY
Kielbasa and potatoes with honey mustard garlic sauce, mashed acorn squash

Tuesday was encouraging because the car died in the school parking lot, and I had to get a jump start. We’re pretty sure it’s the alternator, not the battery, so I have been leaving the engine running when I park anywhere, until we can get it fixed. It’s especially edifying to idle in front of one of those “Let Little Lungs Breathe!” signs.

Basically me:

Then on the way home, I stopped at the garage and asked them if my tire looked like it was worth fixing. They said it had a lot of dry rot and was pretty worn down, so yes, of course they could fix it, and get me through the winter for $40. Dave’s understands me.

Anyway, I have a good number of acorn squash in the garden this year.

I also planted a TON of butternut squash, and I didn’t get a single one. It is a squash mystery. I do think curcurbit seedlings get together and hatch a plan for how to be confusing, like kids in the back of the room when a substitute teacher shows up. But as I’ve mentioned, I did get some wonderful pumpkins.

I think I already said this last week. I’m sorry, it all blends together.

Not gonna lie, those were some elderly potatoes and some pretty venerable kielbasas I found. But that’s the point of kielbasa! It endures. I cut up the potatoes and kielbasa to be about the same size and roasted them with oil, salt, and pepper until they were almost done, and then drizzled half the honey mustard sauce over it and finished cooking it.

I served it with the rest of the sauce for dipping, and a nice bowl of mashed squash.

I made the squash thus: I cut them in half, scooped out the seeds and strings, and drizzled them with olive oil, and sprinkled on salt and pepper. I figured I could add sugar or honey if needed, but they were nice and sweet on their own. I broiled them until they got a little char

and then scooped out the flesh and mashed it. I love this, but I think I was the only one who ate it. Damien was out and Lena has moved out, and it turns out they were the only other two squash-eaters in the house besides me. Oh well!

WEDNESDAY
Chinese chicken dumplings, noodles, meatballs

Wednesday morning, the replacement oven part came! I wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong with the old heating element, but when I pulled it out, it became evident.

I’m no expert, but that ain’t right! So I cleaned out the horrible grungy crusty oven and put the new element in. This turns out to be super easy! You just unscrew the little screw in the bracket, and then insert the tab thingies into the socket thingies. I had no idea.

The freezer yielded some ground chicken and turkey, and a package of dumpling wrappers. I more or less followed this recipe, which calls for pork, so I bumped up the seasoning a bit to compensate for the blandness of chicken. I also didn’t have sesame oil, and I had a red cabbage instead of Napa. It calls for salting the shredded cabbage and then squeezing out the moisture, which I forgot to do like I always do; so it was a little wet and a little too salty. BHUT, nobody minds salty food around here, and the wetness is only an issue when you’re making the dumplings (just makes the filling a little sloppy to handle), and not when you’re eating them.

I made probably forty dumplings, but the wrappers got increasingly gummy as I worked through the pile, and eventually became unusable. I ended up with a lot of extra meat mixture, so I made wobbly little meatballs, which I browned in oil

and then finished cooking in chicken broth.

I really didn’t feel like steaming the dumplings, so . . . I actually can’t remember how I cooked them. I either simmered them in a pan of water, or possibly baked them. It’s a duck blur.

I also cooked up some Hello Kitty noodles I got at the Asian Market a few weeks ago.

I boiled them for a few minutes and drained them, and added the little sauce packets. They turned out to have a strong sesame flavor, which was pleasant.

Altogether a very fine meal, if somewhat salty. And somewhat salty.

That afternoon, I got a visit from Sally!! with whom I’ve been internet friends for something like twelve years, but never met in person! Absolutely delightful.

She brought me some bacon and ground beef from her homestead, and we went out and picked peaches to fill up her cooler. Then we sat down with coffee and just yacked. So nice.

Wednesday I also did some more seed gathering. I’m gonna make my own flower seed mixes this year and see how that works.

It’s pretty marigold-heavy at the moment, but I also have cosmos, forget-me-nots, zinnias, and lupines in there, and some blackeyed susans and a few others that I forget what they are. So a mix of perennials and annuals. We’ll see how that goes! Going to adoration today, so we’ll see what I can swipe from the church garden.

THURSDAY
Chicken nuggets with peach butter and BBQ sauce, chips

Thursday we had a dentist appointment and I thought it was the first Cub Scout meeting, but it turned out I got the day wrong; but in the meantime, I had planned a meal of convenience, which I was not mad about.

So I had a lot of time freed up before dinner, and spent it trying to get a photo of the downy woodpecker who keeps coming back to the feeder.

(Here you will have to imagine a really good picture of a downy woodpecker, because I certainly didn’t get one.)

I also made a harvesting tool for myself, to pick the peaches on the high branches. It’s made of a metal pole, a flower pot, and a catching basket from the game Trac Ball, which I got on the side of the road; and zip ties. It . . . kind of works.

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If the peaches are very ripe, they fall right into the pot. If they’re not very ripe, it’s a struggle; and the struggle causes other ripe ones to fall off and bonk you on the head. I need the top to have a little rake or claw, to pluck the more reluctant fruit off. I’m so mad I didn’t think to call it a “Peach Reacher,” though!

Anyway, we had signed up to bring dessert to a back-to-school cookout, and Damien asked what I wanted to bring, and I said PEACHES, which is a fine all-purpose answer to any question. But when it came down to it, I didn’t want to bring just a bowl of peaches, so I dug into the freezer again and found a few packages of empanada dough discs, and I made a big pot of peach pie filling, loosely following this recipe.

and I made 20 empanadas, or I guess hand pies.

Then I brushed them with an egg wash and sprinkled sugar and cinnamon on top.

I also have a good amount of peach filling leftover, and I’ll probably make a pie.

FRIDAY
School cookout

I believe they are serving hot dogs. The kids who are not going will be making and eating mac and cheese and watching Frasier, I’m guessing.

And I just suddenly realized I signed up to give blood in an hour! Last time I went, I was just under the limit for iron, so I just went and gobbled up a can of tuna, some raisins, and a pack of instant cream of wheat. Now I’m mustering all my metabolic powers and manifesting that iron into my finger blood. Wish me luck.

Update: My iron was too low again. But first I had to wait for an hour in the hallway of an LDS church, because they overbooked again. I guess I should take iron pills or some shit. Anyway, I went from the blood drive to adoration and then picked up some of the kids while Damien picked up others, and he went to bail out an adult kid with a car that wouldn’t start, and I zipped home to drop off some kids and bake the empanadas, and then back to the cookout.

The empanadas turned out yummy!

Probably could have done with a dust of confectioner’s sugar on top, so people knew for sure they were dessert; but they did all get eaten.

I stopped at Auto Zone on the way home and a VERY strange person hooked the little computer up to my car, and it said my battery and my alternator and my whole starter system and charging system are all fine. So I guess the car just doesn’t start sometimes because it just doesn’t want to. I truly cannot argue with that.

One-pan kielbasa, cabbage, and red potato dinner with mustard sauce

This meal has all the fun and salt of a wiener cookout, but it's a tiny bit fancier, and you can legit eat it in the winter.

Ingredients

3-4 lbs kielbasa
3-4 lbs red potatoes
1-2 medium cabbages
(optional) parsley for garnish
salt and pepper and olive oil

mustard sauce (sorry, I make this different each time):

mustard
red wine if you like
honey
a little olive oil
salt and pepper
fresh garlic, crushed

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 400.

Whisk together the mustard dressing ingredients and set aside. Chop parsley (optional).

Cut the kielbasa into thick coins and the potatoes into thick coins or small wedges. Mix them up with olive oil, salt, and pepper and spread them in a shallow pan.

Cut the cabbage into "steaks." Push the kielbasa and potatoes aside to make room to lay the cabbage down. Brush the cabbage with more olive oil and sprinkle with more salt and pepper. It should be a single layer of food, and not too crowded, so it will brown well.

Roast for 20 minutes, then turn the food as well as you can and roast for another 15 minutes.

Serve hot with dressing and parsley for a garnish.

What’s for supper? Vol. 392: I hope you guys like hearing about peaches

Happy Friday! Today’s post will be a good one for people who enjoy color. Especially peach color. And peaches!

Oh yes, peaches. I couldn’t stand it any longer, and finally started picking. And picking, and paying kids to pick, and picking some more. I estimate at least 130 pounds so far, and there are still hundreds of peaches on the tree. Just one little tree! What a champ.

This is also our first week back at school, and so far, I’m not a fan. Much rather sit and home and eat peaches.

SATURDAY
Grilled ham and cheese, strawberry shortcake

Shopping day with Corrie, plus a side quest to SPIRIT HALLOWEEN, which now opens in early August and hasn’t gotten any less silly. Damien made yummy sandwiches while I recovered.

Benny prepped the strawberries with sugar and a little vanilla. I just got pre-made cake shells for dessert, and squirty whipped cream from a can. Not shortcake per se, but who doesn’t like this.

We were planning a little outing on Sunday, so Satuday evening I prepped a bunch of peaches and a streusel topping ahead of time, so I could put it together when I got home. Benny and Corrie helped with blanching the peaches

and we had sort of mixed success peeling them.

I got better at this over the course of the week! My process now is to rinse the peaches, score the bottom in an X, dump them in boiling water for a full two minutes,

and then fish them out and dump them in ice water. Lots of recipes said thirty seconds in boiling water, but the skin just doesn’t slide off like it’s supposed to when I do it that way. Maybe it varies by peach or by ripeness, but that’s what I’ve found.

I also made a batch of vanilla ice cream, and didn’t notice that the dasher got hung up, so it ended up not terribly smooth, oh well.

SUNDAY
Deli sandwiches, peach cobbler

Sunday after Mass, it was the very last day everybody was still on summer vacation, so we went to Trap Falls in Ashby, MA. This is a place we discovered several years ago when the kids were little and I dragged everybody on a yurt camping trip. The lake in the campgrounds was closed because of cyanobacteria or something, so we drove around looking for an alternative, and stumbled across this — not quite paradisal, but extremely lovely spot

We’ve been back several times, and it’s almost always a good trip. When the kids were little, it was glorious. Now it’s just merely pleasant. But I’ll take it!

We brought the dog along, and he enjoyed himself, which he always does, everywhere, in every circumstance, including when he went with Damien to go find oil for my car when it abruptly ran out of oil, but especially including when we stopped for ice cream on the way home.

Got home and ate the deli sandwiches I got at Market Basket, and made the peach cobbler, which turned out . . . juicy.

I really should have drained those peaches! In retrospect, the oven slowly dying was also probably partly to blame, but I didn’t realize it yet. But it was still a delicious dessert, especially topped with ice cream.

I made a huge amount of streusel topping and saved half of it, thinking I would make cobbler (or crisp or whatever) at least a few more times. Then I ate a bunch of it, and I’m not even sorry. Butter, flour, cinnamon, and sugar. I’m a monster and I don’t care.

MONDAY
Mussakhan and taboon

Monday the Catholic high school kid and the college kid started school, and I had a little errand in a different town, and Damien started covering a hearing in Concord; so the driving was . . . extensive.

But I was determined to stick to the rather ambitious menu I had planned, so I made mussakhan (Palestinian roast chicken) and taboon. Here’s the mussakahn recipe from Saveur that I use; and here is the taboon recipe:

Jump to Recipe

The oven breathed its last just as the chicken finished cooking, which was a mercy! Ten minutes earlier and we would have been in trouble.

Sadly, the bread has just started baking, and it does bake quickly, but not quickly enough, so I was in a bit of a pickle with that. Just the bottom heating element broke, though, so I broiled the bread, and it was not amazing, but edible.

It really is a great meal in general, though. The chicken is so juicy, and I adore that sour-bright, earthy sumac flavor. I even splurged on pine nuts, which I don’t always do, and they get toasted up in oil and then sprinkled over the hot chicken. Spectacular.

I had timed things down to the minute, but didn’t factor in an “oh crap, the oven broke” eventuality, so I ended up eating my dinner in the car.

Which is just as well, because this allowed me to shamelessly gnaw on the bones like a neanderthal.

That night, a child who shall remain nameless decided to bleach and dye her hair, which is fine, but it’s less fine to get bleach in your eye, especially when your mother is not home. So I GOT home as fast as I could, and we went to the ER, where they hooked said child up with a kind of contact lens device attached to a tube with a bag of fluids, which flushed the eye out. No eye damage, thank God!

It’s a very damp process, though, especially when you haven’t rinsed the blue out of your hair yet.

The doctor reassured us that far, far worse things had happened to that sheet. And then we got home and collapsed like bunches of broccoli.

TUESDAY
Bagel, egg, cheese, sausage sandwiches

Tuesday was the public high school kid’s first day, and I also promised Corrie I would get her a professional haircut to correct the alleged malicious violence I had done to her hair last month when I gave her the exact haircut she asked for.

Very cute!

Dinner was nice and easy. Tasty, despite the horrible growing sense of a hostile will that strove with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you.

The yolk of a duck egg is a powerful thing.

I also bleached and dyed the tips of Benny’s hair. I actually bleached it twice, because the first time I was like, “Aw, I’ve done this a million times, I don’t need to read the directions,” but it turns out I do. So I sent Elijah out for more bleach, and we got it done.

You there, boy! What year is it?
Why it’s 1983, sir!

I paid the girls to pick a bunch of peaches for me, and I blanched about mmm fifty pounds of them.

(If you are wondering, a box that you definitely are going to return to the post office has a tare weight of 1.84 lbs.)

I cut them up and put them in gallon bags and stuffed them in the freezer.

I didn’t add anything. You can add lemon juice to preserve the color, but these will be for baking anyway, so it didn’t really matter. I also didn’t mind if they froze in one big clump, for the same reason; so I didn’t bother doing any individual freezing tricks to keep them separated.

WEDNESDAY
Butter chicken and rice

Wednesday was the first day for the elementary and middle school kids, which were the last batch of kids. They had half days, but not, of course, the same half; so I was kind of mad at myself for again planning a slightly complex meal on a day when I was gonna be in the car all day; but, on the other hand, BUTTER CHICKEN. Can’t be mad when you’re eating butter chicken, or really even when you’re making it, because it’s so pretty. I use this recipe from Recipe Tin Eats.

I started marinating the meat around noon, and then it does come together very fast if you have all the ingredients prepped. I had splurged on a big sack of basmati rice a few months ago, so I started a big batch of that in the Instant Pot (2 cups of water for each cup of rice, and then just press the rice button, and fluff it with a fork when it’s done — turns out great), and cooked up the chicken in the lovely marinade

then added the pureed tomatoes and cream

and let that simmer for about half an hour.

Oh, it smells so good.

While that was cooking, I prepped some pork for Thursday’s dinner. I am so smart! Sometimes I am so smart.

It was really too hot for butter chicken, but at the same time, it’s always a good day for butter chicken.

Just threw a little cilantro on top. I went back for more rice and more sauce. So very cozy and delicious.

THURSDAY
Bo ssam with gochujang peach sauce, rice, cucumber salad, crunchy rice rolls

The replacement heating element for the oven is ordered, but won’t be here until next Wednesday, so I made the bo ssam in the Instant Pot, following the bare bones of this recipe. I really need to remember to do it this way (in the IP) every time, rather than in the oven, because it turns out spectacular. I just hucked the pork into the pot and pressed “meat.” It said “burn” after a while, so I vented it, checked that it wasn’t actually burning, and pressed “meat” again.

Then I made a dipping sauce with — I swear I wrote this down, but now I can’t find it. Well, it was about eight pitted peaches with the skins on, two tablespoons of brown sugar, a heaping tablespoon of gochujang, half a red onion, and a tablespoon of soy sauce, if I remember correctly, which I never do.

Put it all in the blender

and it made a really nice dipping sauce, sweet and fruity (obviously) with just a little kick from the gochujang.

It went very, very well with the salty meat. I probably could have skipped the onion, though. I’m not crazy about raw onion unless it’s minced or diced. Something slightly unpleasant about pureed raw onion. But there wasn’t a ton in there, so it didn’t ruin it.

I also made a cucumber salad with — I dunno what. Rice vinegar, water, red pepper flakes, white sugar. That sounds plausible. Maybe lime juice.

Ten minutes before dinner, I made a paste of brown sugar, cider vinegar, and salt and spread that on the meat, which was absolutely falling apart by this time, and put it under the broiler.

I served it with Boston lettuce to wrap the meat in, and the sauce to dip; plus the cucumber salad, and crunchy rice rolls. And a dish of plums, just to shake things up.

The meat came out SO NICE, and everything complemented each other so well.

Completely excellent meal.

That evening, I headed back to the peach mines and blanched another thirty-plus peaches, and made peach butter.

I followed this recipe, kind of, except I used far less brown sugar than she said, and bumped up the spices a bit. I love that it has cardamom.

You cook the peaches in pieces for a while,

then run it through a blender, then cook it some more. She says to cook it down for 10-15 minutes for the second cook, which I knew was going to be nonsense. I set it to a very low simmer and just let it go, uncovered, for something like three hours, stirring it occasionally.

Then I poured it into jars

and put it in the fridge. I think it’s already all spoken for, so I’ll have to make some more! It’s the consistency of thick applesauce, loose but spreadable. It will be so nice on toast. It would be spectacular on french toast, or hot scones, or bread pudding.

FRIDAY
Tuna noodle

Sophia, who is not back to school because she is taking a gap year to work and save up money, volunteered to make tuna noodle. I’m hoping and praying the dang jury reaches a verdict today so we can see Damien again someday! Maybe we’ll ditch the kids and go out for pizza tonight.

I plan to spend the weekend making as many stovetop or Instant Pot peach recipes as I can find — more peach butter, definitely; and peach salsa sounds tasty, and I am determined to make that peach-tomato-basil -burrata-prosciutto salad, and perhaps I will make more ice cream and grill the peaches. And eventually the oven will work again, and then I’ll — let’s face it, I’ll make more streusel because I will have eaten my stash, and then I’ll make another peach cobbler, and see if I can come up with something a little more solid. Or not. And peach muffins, and peach cheesecake!

I also dropped off bags of peaches with a few people, and called Vincent de Paul to see if they want peaches, Because, I don’t know if you guys realize this, but I have a lot of peaches.

This is the tree right meow, still:

Not suffocating under obscenely heavy clusters of fruit like it was before, but still, plenty of peaches!

And I’m sort of nervously keeping an eye on this situation:

But not yet! It’s not time to worry about that yet.

I . . I did plant another grape vine yesterday. Because what if we run out of fruit? WHAT IF WE RUN OUT OF FRUIT????

Oh, here is a photo of last Friday’s poke bowl, which turned out rather pretty.

Rice, ahi tuna, salt and pepper cashews, pea sprouts, sugar snap peas, and pickled mango on top, and watermelon and some kind of weird wafer cookies from Aldi on the plate. (They were supposed to be coconut wafers with caramel and sesame seeds, if I recall, but they were just sort of neutral wafers with caramel. Not bad, but not quite as exotic as the package promised.)

The pickled mango was a mistake! It was violently salty and spicy and not much else, with big chunks of rind. I was thinking it would be a sweetish chutney, but it was not! Live and learn.

And since I mentioned color at the top, check out this beaut.

I have about a dozen pumpkins growing nicely, but this is the biggest, brightest one. It took me 49 years to figure out what I’m really good at, and that thing is: Growing pumpkins. I’ll take it! I saved seeds from last year’s biggest jack-o’-lantern and planted them in composted soil, and that’s my whole secret.

The rest of it is just good soil. Good, good soil. I can’t take credit for it, but I’m glad.

taboon bread

You can make separate pieces, like pita bread, or you can make one giant slab of taboon. This makes enough to easily stretch over a 15x21" sheet pan.

Ingredients

6 cups bread flour
4 packets yeast
3 cups water
2 Tbsp salt
1/3 cup olive oil

Instructions

Mix the flour, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a standing mixer.
While it is running, add the olive oil. Then gradually add the water until the dough is soft and sticky. You may not need all of it. Let it run for a while to see if the dough will pull together before you need all the water. Knead or run with the dough hook for another few minutes.
Put the dough in a greased bowl, grease the top, and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise in a warm spot for at least an hour until it has doubled in size.
Preheat the oven to 400. Put a greased pan or a baking stone in the oven to heat up.
If you are making separate pieces, divide it now and cover with a damp cloth. If you're making one big taboon, just handle it a bit, then put it back in the bowl and cover it with a damp cloth. Let rest ten minutes.
Using a little flour, roll out the dough into the shape or shapes you want. Poke it all over with your fingertips to give it the characterstic dimpled appearance.
Bake for 10-12 minutes until it's just slightly browned.