Winos and Fruits

For this post, I'll need the help of my lovely assistant. We're going to show you how to clean out a fridge full of fruit using only two glasses, two pitchers, two extra-large bottles of cheap white wine, a mini four-pack of cheap white wine, some brandy, rum, and maybe some of that raspberry syrup you made the other day.

First peel (optional) and slice all the peaches in your fridge. Save some for the peach sorbet you're going to make in the next blog post, and divide the rest between two pitchers.





One of these pitchers will turn into chilled white wine and peaches. Remember that? We've been drinking it ever since peach season started.

 All the rest of the fruit in your fridge should go into the other pitcher. Probably doesn't matter what kind of fruit it is - we had a few blueberries and blackberries leftover from the most recent fruit picking expedition.

Add sugar, stir around.

Then add a lot of brandy to the mix of fruit.

Then decide you need some more fruit to balance it out, and go to the store to get some plums.

Might as well throw some raspberry syrup in there too, as long as it's lying around.


Then add some white wine.

Add some more white wine.

Stir around.

And let everything chill in the fridge overnight. You can drink it with your pancakes tomorrow morning.

At this point, you've been running around, slicing peaches, buying brandy and plums, and stirring things all day, so you need a drink. Take out that bottle of raspberry syrup you made the other day. See it in the fridge? Mix it with some rum, and pour it over ice.

 You deserve it.

peach-berry pie and vanilla ice cream: a love story

Flat Pie

I didn't have a chance to do anything with the peaches and nectarines I'd picked on Wednesday until Sunday, when the stone fruits I'd left to ripen on the counter were in danger of becoming mush (a couple had already disintegrated) and I had to use them all immediately. Which was fine, because I had two galette doughs in the fridge - the same crust recipe from Smitten Kitchen that I used for the zucchini galette - and a bunch of blackberries in the fridge from Wednesday that I hadn't finished off yet.

I peeled the fuzzy white peaches (dunking them in boiling water for 30 seconds or so) but left the peels on the nectarine slices, figuring that they'd maintain their shape anyway.

Each galette had five or six small stone fruits and about a cup of blackberries with just a little bit of corn starch thrown in. Rolling out the galette dough in 90+ degree heat was a little tragic - it got extremely sticky and tried to melt, which made for some fairly ugly galettes.

I think the heat also made the dough less flaky and crusty, having melted all the butter prior to its introduction to the oven, although some of the blame definitely goes to the blackberries, which don't really macerate very well, but do let out a huge amount of liquid during the baking process. So the fruit juices ran out all over the dough, and soaked the inside, and the sad, overheated dough wasn't really able to overcome the onslaught of summer. And the oven heated up the kitchen to an almost unbearable level. Lesson learned: don't bake on hot days. 

But with all that said, these were some pretty delicious galettes, particularly the peach-blackberry, which played off the sweetness of the almost overripe peaches with the remarkably flavorful blackberries. It's almost too bad that the rest of the peaches went into making this chilled peaches and white wine mixture, except that it was even more refreshing and delicious than the galettes, probably due to a surprisingly wonderful white wine donated to the cause by my peach-picking/baking/eating accomplice.

And apologies to the French, but apparently the term "flat pie" is infinitely more comprehensible and amusing than "galette."

Summer stains my hands with blackberries and all is forgiven.

My favorite kitchen activity is baking. I particularly love crispy, buttery doughs and juicy fillings and sweet-tart pairings, and, predictably, all those things usually amount to pie. And the best pie ingredients are found in the summer, when fruit muscles out all the leafy greens and root vegetables at the markets and piles of sweet, juicy, colorful, ripe summer fruits suddenly burst onto the scene. But I never want to dedicate any of my summer fruit to a pie, preferring to slice it open and eat it as soon as it hits its peak ripeness. Cooking any of it only seems justified if there's such an excess that it couldn't all be eaten fresh without getting a massive stomach ache. So, in order to create such an excess and get my pie, I went out to the country with two of my foodie friends to go fruit picking.

To ensure the best of all worlds, we found a farm with both pit fruits and berries, collecting several pounds of peaches and nectarines and huge handfuls of blackberries.



It was wonderful to get outside this hot, cement city for a few hours (although the farm was plenty hot as well) and to be surrounded by greenery and orchards and fruits and bugs and all those things that us city people usually refer to as "nature" despite the obvious construction, maintenance, and care that goes into farming.

We weren't the only ones enjoying the soft fruit and the cool shade at the farm. I really love interesting, non-human-blood-sucking insects, almost as much as I love peaches.

After a few sweat-soaked hours in the sun, we each came away with a huge bag of peaches and a wealth of blackberries, which will, over the next few days, make their way into a galette, some white wine, and my mouth.

In fact, some already have.