My favorite food of late summer: peaches

I assumed I was leaving behind the best stone fruits in the world when I left Alberta, where the amazing orchards of between-the-mountain-ranges British Columbia provided summertime fruit bliss. But here in Central Illinois, our farmer's markets are graced with freestone peaches from southern Illinois, where the trees grow large yellow-orange fuzzy peaches with magenta centers. They look gorgeous, they smell divine when they finish ripening on the countertop, and I can buy them for $8 a half-peck bag (12 to 15 peaches). The farmer who comes up to Saturday's market in Bloomington often gives me an extra peach or two so the bag is overflowing. They are every bit as delicious as the best offerings fresh from the farm stand in B.C.

I get so excited seeing the piles of peach crates in the farmer's truck that I can't get that stupid "Peaches" song from the 90s from the Presidents of the United States of America out of my head.
Millions of peaches, peaches for me
Millions of peaches, peaches for free

Each year for three summers here, I've tried a new recipe or two that I hope will bring out the best in Illinois peaches. Here is the stand-out dessert of peach season 2011.

Peach Cobbler
about 8 servings

Peach sauce:
8 to 10 fresh peaches, peeled, pitted and sliced
2 Tbsp Minute tapioca
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 to 1/2 tsp powdered ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1 Tbsp cold butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix all the above ingredients in an 8-inch by 11.5-inch glass baking pan. Dot with small pieces of butter. Let the mixture sit while you prepare the topping.

Cobbler topping:
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 cup cold Crisco shortening
3/4 cup milk (or almond/soy/rice milk)
1-2 Tbsp sugar

Combine dry ingredients. Cut in shortening until no lumps are present. Mix in milk to make a thick but wet batter. Add more milk if batter is dry or doughy. Drop batter onto peaches by large tablespoons. Sprinkle batter with sugar. Bake 30 minutes uncovered in 375 degree oven until batter is golden and sauce is bubbly.

Serve warm or cold, with or without cream poured over each serving. I eat this cobbler straight out of the oven as dessert with dinner, then again at breakfast with yogurt and/or granola and one more time after dinner if there is any left.

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The fall goodness challenge

A co-worker asked for ideas in combining his favorite foods from his favorite season, fall. He listed the things he'd love to eat together in the same dish, and then he bounced off on me a couple of ideas he had. Another co-worker chimed in, and I had an idea for something fun: an Iron-Chef-style challenge. Four of us will think about the combo of ingredients for a short time and then we'll appoint a date when we all bring in a sample of our best recipes to test out on our co-workers, asking them to choose a winning dish.

The list of ingredients that are must-haves: pork, pumpkin, apples and chai spices or chai tea. Additional stipulations to fit his current diet: no added sweeteners, no grains or corn, use dairy products with full fat and no filler ingredients. All types of pork products are allowed as are all forms of apple including juice and cider.

My first ideas lean in two directions: 1) pork tenderloin in an orange, spicy stew w/hard apple cider and 2) bacon in a thick, spiced sour-creamy pumpkin soup with zucchini and chunks of apple and pumpkin. As I think about it a little further, I wonder I might be able to turn prosciutto or bacon into a piecrust, like a top crust on a pot pie or a casing for little tarts. Apple-pork sausage meatballs in pumpkin-chai sauce? Savory custards baked in pumpkins or apples? The possibilities are numerous.

More updates here when I test recipes.

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Weird ideas with watermelon

I have a watermelon in the refrigerator right now, but I don't think I'll repeat this experimental dish from earlier in the season: broiled/grilled watermelon.

Mark Bittman warned me that this dish would be little more than a memorable gimmick, but I had half a watermelon handy, plenty of time, easy access to fresh herbs on the back porch, an audience that was game (my husband and mother-in-law) and a hankerin' for novelty, so I tried his suggestion of brushing slices of watermelon with olive oil and sprinkling with salt, pepper and minced fresh rosemary, then placing the pieces in the broiler of the oven (or on the grill, if I had decided to fire up the grill at my in-laws'), and blasting them with heat until they gave up a lot of liquid and turned chewier. This took about 20 minutes.

They were called watermelon steaks in the recipe, but they reminded all of us more of a cooked summer squash in their texture and flavor. Of course, they retained some of the sweetness of watermelon along with that squash-like flavor, which struck us as an odd combination. We declared them not bad, but not worth repeating as plain-old fresh watermelon is far and away more satisfying.

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Yup, I'm definitely not from around here

(repost from my other blog, http://hbevert.livejournal.com/)

This week's example: until this week, I didn't know what a Texas sheetcake is. I also don't know how it's different from a sheetcake when I'm talking to a customer at work who wants to make a special order of salads and cake for a party. My locally-raised co-worker insists that all sheetcakes are Texas sheetcakes, but I know that the sheetcakes on our price list are the kind I'm used to and not what the customer is describing. I tell the customer that I'll ask the baker to call her back the next day.

When I ask the baker, "so what's a Texas sheetcake anyway?" the next day, other co-workers filtering in and out of the kitchen during the conversation all indicate that for them, the Texas sheetcake is a family-gathering staple. I get this feeling everyone in Illinois and Indiana knows what this thing is except me, and they can't wait for the next time they'll eat it after this conversation. Clearly this is yet another Southern dish that didn't make it across the Cheddar Curtain (the border between Illinois and Wisconsin).

Here's a description for any of you readers who have never heard of Texas sheetcake either:
1. Texas sheetcake is very flat because it is made with a pretty runny cake batter.
2. This cake is usually a chocolate cake made with cocoa.
3. The frosting is a cooked frosting a la Red Velvet cake, but once again it is chocolate. (Yeah, I had no idea what Red Velvet cake tasted like or how to make it before I got here either, but I'd at least read about it.)
4. There are actually baking pans sold as "Texas sheetcake" pans. They are basically just a larger-surface-area jelly roll pan, perhaps slightly deeper.
5. Very important for a proper Texas sheetcake: spread on the frosting when the cake is straight out of the oven. It will melt all over and make the cake fudgey.

Illinois is a place where the northern smelt fry meets the southern cheesy grits, where the local tastes may vary in the same town on whether hockey puck-style or fluffy biscuits are the vehicle for the sausage gravy, where you have to ask whether the tea is "sweet" or "unsweet" because it could be either. Where we are just far enough south to grow peaches but just a little too far north to see many black-eyed peas. It's a place of regional food fence-sitting, where the sheetcake is from Texas, and the fried cheese curd is from Wisconsin.

I don't have to always feel like an out-of-sorts northern transplant who likes weird "foreign" foods. My Canadian-American co-worker and I can wax poetic about the joys of the Nanaimo bar or poutine. One of the owners grew up in Minnesota, so she knows what I mean when I talk about hotdish, krumkake and lefse. She brought me back some smoked trout from her trip to the North Shore of Lake Superior this summer. It's divine on an English muffin for breakfast. Reminds me of Fischbrötchen Andrew and I ate on the Baltic Sea shore on our honeymoon.

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Magenta-colored love in a bowl

The simplest summer soup, made with new beets that arrived in our CSA box. Lotsa beets, not much else going on. Andrew and I make certain soups for each other that end up being code for "I love you," such as his curried squash winter stew, because I told him the first time he made it that it made me fall in love with him all over again. If reading that last sentence hasn't made you ill, try making this soup for someone you adore.

Be sure to keep the beet greens. They are edible, too, and they taste just like beets.

Beets, borscht-ish
serves 3-4

About 1 pound beets with greens
chicken stock (or water w/chicken broth powder)
a handful of fresh dill
sour cream (soy sour cream is what I used)
salt and pepper to taste

After washing the beets and their greens, cut off and keep the greens. Then slice the tops and the root ends off the beets and peel. Cut beets into bite-sized chunks and place in a pot. Chop the greens finely and add to the pot. Pour over enough chicken stock to cover the beets and greens and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat and simmer until the greens are softening and the roots are becoming tender. Chop up the dill finely and cook it in the soup until it wilts and the rest of the veggies are done. Season with salt and pepper. Serve with a generous dollop of sour cream as garnish for each bowl.

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