Peaches Coming Out of Our Ears (Recipes for the Inundated)

When we bought our house in 2002, one of its selling features was a 30 year old peach tree in the backyard that gave off hundreds of fruits each summer. Thirty years, though, is about as long as a peach tree lives, so within three years or so, we had to take it down.

In the meantime, baby peach trees kept sprouting all over the yard, growing from the thousands of pits that fell from the tree. We root them up as religiously as the Little Prince does his baobabs (our yard is about the size of his planet), but Peter left one offspring to grow along the fence, with idea of espaliering it as a decorative tree. We understood that it would not bear fruit; only grafted trees did that.

Well, four years later that tree is yielding us more fruit than its mother ever did. This year we harvested a thousand peaches, and I’m not being hyperbolic. See that picture above? That’s our dining room table covered with over 300 peaches, which have been left to ripen before we process them (unlike other fruit, peaches ripen off the tree). We’ve done this three times now – and there are still peaches on the tree.

It’s been too hot to do much baking or preserving, so I’ve mostly been cutting the peaches up and freezing them for cooking/processing when the temperature goes down. (Turner Classic Movies, Wimbledon,  the World Cup were very helpful to me as I cleaned and sliced my way through a millenium of fruit.) But I have done some baking and preserving – my two stalwart peach recipes that I can make in my sleep. I share them here with you.

The most important thing about cooking with peaches is to start with really good fruit. Mealy peaches make mealy desserts and preserves. Obviously, most of you don’t have peach trees in your backyards, so the best advice I can give you is the buy local peaches in season. And remember – peaches ripen OFF the tree, so don’t worry if they are hard when you buy them (in fact, if they’re soft, you probably won’t even be able to cook with them). If the peaches are local, that means they were picked just a day or two prior to your buying them. Lay them out – not touching each other – for another day or two until the peach flesh gives when you gently press your thumb against the area around the stem and at the base of the fruit. It should also smell like a peach. Now it’s ready to be eaten or processed.

One other piece of advice: I do not peel my peaches. That’s partly a self-preservation strategy: I have over a thousand to deal with, remember. But peach skins have all the pectin, so if you are baking or preserving, the skin is a critical ingredient for thickening and texture. I, however, really don’t like peach fuzz (it actually makes my skin crawl), so what I do is take a damp, tight-weave cotton cloth and gently wipe the fuzz off the peaches (this will also clean them of dirt and residue pesticides if those were used in the farming).

OK, enough preamble. Here are my two stand-by, stand-up peach recipes.

Curried Peach Chutney
(Note that these ingredients are to taste, which is why I give ranges; there is no science to this recipe)

• 4-5 cups chopped peaches, with skin (I generously fill up my quart-size Pyrex measuring cup) 
• 1 small to medium onion, roughly chopped
• 1/2 - 1 cup raisins (golden, Thompson, whatever your favorite; you can also use currants or dried cranberries)
• 1/2- 2/3 cup white wine or apple cider vinegar
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1/2 – 1 cup chopped red pepper
• 1/2 – 1 chopped jalapeno or other hot pepper
• 1/4 – 1/3 cup finely chopped fresh ginger (you can substitute a heaping teaspoon of ground ginger if you don’t have fresh)
• 1 TBSP mustard seed
• 1 to 2 TBSP curry
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 – 1 cup brown sugar (you can also use white; note that I use WAY less sugar than most chutney recipes, which I think are egregiously over-sugared)

Throw everything but the dried spices and sugar in a large pan and stir over high heat until it comes to a boil. Add the spices and sugar and boil hard for 5 minutes, constantly stirring. Turn down the heat and cook for another 5 minutes or so.

This recipe yields about 3 pints of chutney. If you want to preserve, pour it into cleaned and sterilized jars (fill to a 1/4 inch from the top) and process in a water bath for 10 minutes. You can also make half this recipe just eat it right away. Definitely keeps in your fridge for a couple of weeks. Great with pork, chicken, and lamb.

Peach Cobbler
Filling

• 3 lbs. of peaches, in slices or chunks, tossed in a tablespoon of lemon juice
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar, depending on sweetness of peaches and your taste
• 2 TBSP of tapioca flour (my thickener of choice; you can buy in Chinese markets) or corn starch. Or grind instant tapioca in a spice grinder and use that.

Preheat oven to 375. Grease a 9x9 baking pan. Toss the peaches with the sugar and tapioca flour and spoon into the pan.

Topping

• 1 1/2 c. flour
• 1/2 cup sugar (or a bit less if you don’t like too sweet)
• 2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1 egg
• 2/3 cup buttermilk, sour milk, or yogurt (all work perfectly well)
• 6 TBSP melted butter, cooled.

Combine the dry ingredients. Then beat the egg with the buttermilk and butter. Fold the wet mixture into the dry mixture until combined. Do not over mix.

Drop the topping onto the peach filling in large spoonfuls to cover the surface. IMPORTANT NOTE: Do NOT heap the filling on too high. You may have more topping than you need and if you just heap it on, the batter closest to the peaches will not bake. If you have too much batter, make a personal-sized cobbler in a ramekin.

Place the pan on a cookie sheet. Bake for 40 minutes or so until it is golden brown on top and the filling is bubbling. Best served warm with vanilla ice cream.

Living La Vida Localiente

If you’re not on the East Coast, you may not know that we have had a heat wave for the first ten days of July. Do I have to tell you that a hundred degrees in New York City is not pretty? I didn’t think so.

What’s even more worrisome to me than the heat itself, is the fear of a power blackout. Peter and I got off easy in the last one (the Northeast power outage of 2003), but the image of those people who were on the subway when the power went out has never stopped haunting me. (To this day, I travel on the subway – always – with a water bottle and a Maglite.) I just don’t want to contribute to the possibility of that happening again, even in my own small way.

So, in a fit of social responsibility, Peter and I have been trying to live without air conditioning. Because the first floor of our house is slightly below grade, the living room is actually not unpleasant. And as long as I don’t use the oven or stove, the kitchen is fine too. The second floor, with three really powerful ceiling fans and the judicious lowering and raising of blinds, is manageable enough.

When we get to my office, however, which is an extension on the back of the house, that’s a different story. By 1 pm, when the sun has made its arc over to our backyard and is beating down on the tar roof above my head, my fingers start to stick to the keyboard and my entire body is coated in a body paint of itchy sweat.

My way of coping has been to take off the afternoons and go to the movies! I figure that the air conditioning is already on in these places and the more people who partake of it, the more efficiently it runs. (I think that’s called rationalization, but it may be true too.) I saw four matinees last week: I Am Love and Winter’ Bone, both of which I highly recommend; Please Give, which I think is fine and definitely better than sitting in an unairconditioned* office; and Great Directors, a pathetic movie that I can’t believe actually got funded and distributed (the director/producer must have her own trust fund).

Peter has been a relentless urban farmer throughout this humid hideousness, waking every morning at six to hand water (see above; did I mention that we’ve also been in a mini drought?), the result of which has been that we have been eating salads from our garden every day, not to mention peaches and raspberries, and basil by the truckloads. Breakfasts have been peach-blueberry-raspberry yogurt smoothies (made with cantaloupe ice balls that we froze at the end of last summer). 

Not so loco after all, I guess.

*The spell check function in Word does not recognize the word unairconditioned. Is that a cultural statement or what?

Blithe Impermanence

I've decided that peonies are the best Buddhist teachers. They open in spectacular blooms and then, just as I am getting so attached to them, they start to fade, reminding me that however much I want things to remain as they are — everything changes.

Thunderstorms were threatened for today, so I went out and cut the most vulnerable of the blooms, and brought them inside to protect for another day or two. But even that effort is futile — as I write this, peony petals are falling onto my desk. They're lovely, though, even in their blithe impermanence.

Love and Imperfection

Christmas was a blessedly quiet event this year. Peter and I gave one another just a few gifts, one of which from Peter to me was Bill Buford's Heat, which he bought for me thinking it was by Bill Bryson (whom I love), and then felt sheepish about giving it to me, only to learn that I had been wanting to read the book. I spent, in fact, two dark and rainy days on the couch inhaling the book (with a few interruptions, like a visit from our youngest granddaughter, on Christmas morning).

Paloma, Christmas 2009 (with her Ebee gifts)

Not sure why I was so interested in the book. It's the tale of Buford (founding editor of Granta and former fiction editor of the New Yorker) going to work in professional kitchens, including Mario Batali's much beloved downtown eatery Babbo (where I sadly have never been; too expensive for us). Which means it's a tale of slave labor, humiliation, inhuman levels of stress, flesh burning, flesh slicing, kitchen rage, and basic insanity. Why anyone would choose to subject themselves to this environment is beyond me. Having experienced restaurant life from the front of the house, as a waitress in and right after college, was enough exposure for me. I will say that I am very impressed how restaurants manage to shield their patrons from the outsize macho culture that exists behind the swinging doors.

In the book, Buford asks Batali what he will learn interning at Babbo, and Batali says: the difference between being a home cook and a professional cook. When you work in a restaurant you have to make each dish exactly the same each night—patrons come back to experience the exact pork shank they had last time, and if they don't get it, they don't come back.

Luckily, we home cooks don't live under such tyranny. There's no such thing (at least in my kitchen) as making the same thing exactly the same way each time. Sometimes the difference makes a dish better. Sometimes not so better. Take my minestrone for example, made with my compost stock. I have to admit it was outstanding. I used the beans we grew in our garden and put up for the winter. They had amazing texture for home frozen vegetables. And the purple cabbage thrown in at the end made for such a beautiful palette.

I made a lot of the minestrone, so I froze the rest, which we just had this past week for dinner. Not so good. The broad beans got sort of mushy and tough at the same time (don't know how I managed that trick). Edible, but they'd never serve it at Babbo.

Then there's latkes—I only make them once a year, for Hanukkah, so I follow a recipe. It's from a guy named David Firestone, featured in Molly O'Neill's New York Cookbook, which has really terrific New York "neighborhood" recipes (I make, for instance Curtis Sliwa's Aunt Marie Stacey's chicken soup, the recipe for which is on page 47 of the book). This year I added some celery root to my latkes, inspired by a recent article in the Times. But mostly I just stuck to the recipe. And, as it turned out, they were pretty darn gorgeous and delicious.

But they could have just as easily been a mess. Latkes are scary things—not enough egg, too much matzoh, not enough oil, left in the pan too long... The list of things that could go wrong is terrifyingly long. Which is why I only do them once a year. (That and the oil they cook in stinks up the house for days.)

When things do go wrong in the kitchen, I have to admit that I get depressed. I'm not as hard on myself as a chef is on his line cooks, thank goodness, but Peter does get exasperated with me when I'm moping after a flopped meal. "So what?" he says. He's right, of course. On a rational level.

But maybe cooking isn't a rational act. Maybe because it's an act of love, and love is never rational. You always want to get it right. Like my Christmas paella for our other grandchildren. Now that was a downright righteous act of love!

RE-RE-RE-RE: The Decade to Come (Part 1)

(After Aretha Franklin’s “RESPECT”)

Probably enough has already been said in the media about the decade of EXcess now coming to a close. Instead of EXcoriating that EXecrable and EXcruciating period, my REsolution for the new decade is to REdedicate myself to RE-claiming the political, cultural, and personal high ground in an effort to REconceive our world and REshape our lives for our children and their children.

Please join me in REjecting the decade of EX and REplacing it with the decade of RE by adding your own REsolutions to the growing list below.

I REsolve that in the next decade I’m going to RE-RE-RE-RE-RE-RE

REduce:

• our consumption of plastic, especially bottles, bags, pre-packaged goods. 
• my weight, so after the holidays, it’s back to the South Beach Diet for awhile.

REfrain from:

• buying goods that have likely been shipped long distances by air or truck such as fruits and vegetables from Latin America, Florida, and California; shipments by ship are OK (e.g., olive oil from Italy) 
• accepting plastic bags from merchants; we need to be more vigilant about always having RE-usable sacks .  
• eating empty calories, especially those containing corn and refined sugar.
  

RE-use

• every plastic container that comes into our house, such as cottage cheese and yogurt containers, which we already use to freeze Therese’s excellent compost stocks and which we use at the homeless shelter (where we are overnight volunteers) to pack up left-overs for the guests lunch the next day.
• those damned blue New York Times home-delivery bags; currently, we use them to collect and transport unusable vegetable waste to our backyard compost bins before throwing them away in garbage, but in future we will try to RE-direct them to our friends/relatives who have dogs to use as pooper-scoopers. Although both these uses mean the bags ultimately go to a landfill, supposedly they are bio-degradable (a few months outdoors, 3 years in a landfill.
• our plastic freezer storage bags, which we currently RE-use in the freezer until they are no longer airtight at which point we RE-use them whenever we buy produce, including at: our local Greenmarket and the Park Slope Co-op.
• all other transparent plastic bags, which we already use to bag recyclable paper and/or metal, plastic, and glass per the NYC Sept of Sanitation rules.
• all opaque plastic bags that we’ve gotten from merchants who don’t provide paper bags when we’ve forgotten our reusable sacks; currently we use them as garbage bags (so we don’t have to buy plastic garbage bags) and to put out RE-turnable bottles for trash scavengers to take to REdemption centers. (Yes, I know trash scavenging is illegal, but here in NYC it’s a fact of life, and putting out the REturnables seems to dissuade these scavengers from going through one’s trash.

Stay tuned for more REsolutions.

How We Compost

I used to be just like Therese and Peter, never wasting a bit of food. That is until we started keeping laying hens. Now, we toss them the potato and carrot peels, sandwich crusts not eaten by our children's friends, eggshells, and even coffee grounds. In the old days, I would have felt guilty for not turning that last slice of bread into breadcrumbs. Now I just think about how that slice will turn into an egg.

Before: Scraps from cooking and meals.
Giving our chickens coffee grounds with the hopes of creating the first Egg McZoomZoom.

After: It took our girls 10 minutes to peck the ground clean.
We use this "composted" soil in our garden.

Nothing is wasted.

November Gardening in Brooklyn

Visits this past week from my son, Sam, who runs Poor Farm Farm in Vermont and our friends Otto and Olive, who live in Minneapolis, reminded me how relatively temperate our climate is here in New York City. Our visitors all gaped with wonder at ripening Roma, Beefsteak and cherry tomatoes still on the vines in our garden, not to mention the last of some of our other summer/early fall crops: peppers, eggplants and lima beans (which are still filling out).

Meanwhile, I’ve been monitoring the slow progress of my experimental plantings for late fall: several varieties of shell beans (for soups), Swiss chard, kale, carrots, turnips, cilantro, lettuce, mesclun mix, and a second planting of shell and snap peas. I’ve never before planted this late (mid-September and early October), so I don’t know if the combination of shorter and shortening daylight hours and overcast days will permit enough sunlight for these plants to mature before we get killing frosts (probably in early December).

Inspired by Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest, I’ve also begun my experimental plantings for early winter: some winter-hardy kales, collards, arugula, lettuce, and other greens. Some of these are already planted in regular garden rows, which I plan to cover with Reemay “garden blanket” when hard frosts begin. I’ve also planted some of these in the boxes in the wind-protected alley, where I’ll experiment covering with Reemay and/or Plexiglass.

Re-reading Coleman, I am struck again by the realization that so much of vegetable gardening is experimenting to see what works in one’s particular garden with its unique soil conditions and microclimate. I suspect that results also depend a great deal on annual variations in weather, plant diseases and pests, and even seed germination.

Stay tuned for the results of my experiments.

Urban Composting

We have a compost (actually two) in our Brooklyn backyard, which has been a wonderful thing not only for our vegetable garden, but also for my conscience, having been raised by a depression/World War II-era Catholic mother, who taught me that to waste anything was a sin. My environmental conscience is also gratified that I’m now contributing way less to the landfill on Staten Island.

In the winter, because of the cold temperatures, the compost doesn’t break down much and, therefore, tends to get full. A couple of winters ago I stumbled upon a wonderful way to cut down on how much I put in the compost and make fabulous stock for soups and stews. In fact, I now do this all year round, not just in the winter. It’s also a great stock-making method for city-dwellers without backyards: yields super-easy homemade stock and allows you to practice a kind of urban composting.

The basic idea is that when I am doing food prep, I save out all “good” veggies scraps (more on “good” scraps in a moment) in a gallon-size freezer bag, which I keep in the freezer until completely full. Then I throw the bag contents along with a handful of peppercorns and a couple of bay leaves in a stock pot, cover with water, and bring to a boil. I bring the temperature down, add some salt, and simmer the hell out of it (partially covered or completely uncovered if it’s a huge pot) for a couple of hours. Strain and you should have about eight cups of very rich veggie broth.

“Good” veggie scraps include: peelings from carrots, potatoes (not sweet potatoes), turnips; onion tips and unused inner layers (but not too much of the papery skins), or onions that have gone soft and aren’t great to use but are not spoiled; old garlic that’s no longer fresh but not rotten; tops and bottoms of celery; tops of leeks (very good use for them); tops of fennel; old ginger; scallions that have gone a little slimy but are not decomposed; mushroom stems; asparagus stems; chard stems; end of herbs (thyme or sage stems, rosemary stalks, wilted basil, etc.) Anything else you can think except...

I don’t use anything from the cabbage family—broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage, cauliflower, etc.—because they stink up the stock. Or things like lettuce and spinach, which just fall apart after that long a simmer. I do use the occasional tomato (e.g., wrinkled cherry tomatoes) but I’ve never used them in any great quantity, mostly because they get eaten long before they go south.

For you carnivores, you can also save bones in the freezer and then throw them in the stock as well—a chicken carcass or old ham bone really adds depth to the stock.

Needless to say this is NOT a delicate, well-balanced stock. I don’t even THINK about balancing it —that would defeat the whole point. (I can just see some chefs cringing if they were to read this, but I’m not a chef, I’m a home cook.) So I wouldn’t use it as a base for all soups, but for something like a hearty bean soup, it’s great. I even use it for a butternut squash bisque I make—the squash is such a dominant ingredient that the stock is really background.

Here’s the one inconvenience to compost stock: you really have to wash the vegetables whose peels you plan to use to remove residual pesticides if they’re non-organic, or to remove dirt if they’re organic. Not a huge bother, but a step that you may not ordinarily take.

That said, compost stock is incredibly easy and gratifying to make—the house/apartment smells fabulous during the hours it simmers down and there’s nothing like feeling you’ve sent one less load to the Staten Island land fill.

And here's the best part about compost stock—you don't have to buy expensive store-bought stocks anymore. I have enough stock in my freezer at this point to last me the better part of a year.

A freezer full of compost stock (in recycled cottage cheese and chinese take-out containers).

Peter emptying one of our real composts.

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What the heck is urbal tea?

A little over a year ago, I started compiling a list called "Why Bother?" which attempted to chronicle all the things--both big and small--my husband, Peter, and I were doing in our Brooklyn home to try to counteract what seemed like the inexorable destruction of the planet.

I called the list "Why Bother?" both to acknowledge the helplessness I felt, and to provide a response to those feelings. As post-middle aged people (Peter retired in 2007; I have a few years left to work, if I could find some!), we made it a priority to redefine how to live in the world, if only for the sake of our grandchildren.

My friend Louise, who at the time was working with me on a magazine start-up (that crashed and burned soon after the October 2008 market collapse), talked about these issues with me all the time. She and her husband, Andrew, come at these questions from a different perspective: they live on a family farm in rural Virginia and raise two school-aged children, Graham and Katharine.

But despite our urban-rural and age differences, we share common interests: serious travel (last year Peter and I took a four-month trip to Australia and New Zealand, while Louise and Andrew took their kids out of school for the year and spent half of it living and traveling in South America); serious gardening (even though we have a postage stamp back yard and they live on a farm); and serious cooking (not fancy but principled). We also share common values: respect for the Earth; a love of culture and cultural differences; a respect for the (well) written word; a belief in the common good.

Queen Charlotte Sound, New Zealand

Over the years I've pulled Louise into my work projects, which tend to focus on technology in education. And while it's a perfectly respectable topic and she doesn't turn down the work, she keeps asking me: Can't you get on a magazine that covers gardening or travel or cooking? I wish.

Well, why wish? Fact is, the economics of publishing today mean that we're never going to start our own traditional magazine (if Conde Nast had to close Gourmet, there's no hope for any of us). But why let that keep us back from writing on the things that we feel passionately about? Andrew, who is by far the cleverest of the four of us (but don't tell him I said so), came up with the name of the blog. Urb[an] [rur]al Tea [a blend, where city meets country]. (Or, as he says, "If you have to be so literal, you don't deserve the title.")

I promised I'd write the first entry—and I admit that it's a little serious, but it's hard to get something started with the exact right tone. (I predict that Louise and Andrew will be smart-ass funny, Peter will be deadly serious, and I'll try to be funny and only sometimes succeed.)

The intent is to share the ways we're trying to figure out how to live responsibly and take pride of ownership, at least, of the small patch of Earth we're given the privilege to inhabit. It's a conversation we invite you to join.

Peter in our Brookyn garden

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