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.

Don’t Cry Over Sour Milk Apple Cake

I’m totally phobic about soured milk. I must have repressed memories of my mother forcing it on me as a child (“It tastes fine!”) because I practically convulse if I even think the milk suggests that it might in the next few days start to turn perhaps just a bit so that it may need to be replaced three days hence. Given the psychic/political/emotional/spiritual trauma I go through trying not throw out anything that remotely qualifies as food (see Saved From the Scrapheap), I have looked for ways to use the sour milk, rather than toss.

This recipe combines one I found googling “sour milk recipes” (here’s a link to the original recipe) with one from An Apple Harvest, a book my friend Barb gave me a few years ago, which has some nice recipes in it. One other reason I like this recipe is that it calls for vegetable oil vs. butter—which means you can make it on the spur of the moment. I can't tell you how many baking impulses have been thwarted by the fact that my butter is frozen solid (which maybe is not such a bad thing). This cake—sans nuts—is a baby-pleaser (if Paloma, my granddaughter, is any gauge).


Don't Cry Over Sour Milk Apple Cake 
1 cup + 1/2 tsp sugar
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp all spice or pinch of nutmeg
1/2 cup canola or other vegetable oil
1 cup sour milk*
1/2-1 cup chopped walnuts or other kind of nut (depending on how nutty you like your cake; can be omitted altogether)
1 apple**, any variety, peeled, quartered, cored, and then thinly sliced  
*Note 1: If you don’t have a full cup of sour milk, put whatever amount you have in a measuring cup and then drop in spoonfuls of plain yogurt until the liquid reaches the one-cup measure 
  **Note 2: You can use pears, peaches, plums, blueberries. Honestly, just about any fruit would work.  
Directions:  
1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour a 9x9 inch baking pan (or just spray it with a vegetable oil spray, which is what I do).  
2. Sift together: 1 c. sugar; all the flour, soda and salt; 3/4 tsp of cinnamon; and the all spice or nutmeg into a large bowl.  
3. Stir the sour milk into the flour mixture by hand, then mix in the vegetable oil until all the liquids are thoroughly integrated. The batter will be thicker if yogurt is part of the sour milk mixture. 
4. Fold in the nuts, if you are using.  
5. Scrape into the baking pan and smooth the top. Then layer on top the fruit slices in any pattern you wish. Mix the remaining 1/4 tsp. cinnamon and 1/2 tsp. sugar together and then sift over the top (I use a tea strainer for this).  
6. Bake at 350 for 45 minutes to an hour. It will be done when the middle of the cake has some spring to it when you tap it, or if a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.  
7. Serve warm, if you can, with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

Saved From the Scrapheap (a Mild Obession)

I’ve said this before, but I grew up in a household where it was a sin—and I use that word with all the force of it behind it—to throw away food. That didn’t stop me (I was especially discreet at tossing the shoe-leather liver we were forced to eat once a month on the premise that it was good for our blood), but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel guilty about it. That guilt followed me into adulthood, where for the first twenty years of it, my way of dealing with food I no longer wanted to eat was to leave it to rot and mold away in my refrigerator so that I would have no choice but to throw it away—no guilt! (Ha ha! says the psychotherapist.)

In my 40s I married Peter, whose childhood lessons about not wasting food (we were both raised by people who had lived through the depression and a world war) dovetailed neatly with his propensity to be obsessive-compulsive about almost everything he does, and I found myself living with not only the ghosts of my Catholic childhood but also the Felix Unger of leftovers. Peter goes after saving food with the urgency of a medic on a battlefield. (Earlier this week he got me, protesting at first, to rinse all the mold off some olives that had been left festering in the back of the fridge. I have to admit that they were fine once washed, but I would never have done this on my own.)

Then I started seriously cooking and paying serious attention to food as a political issue, and the non-productive guilt I felt about wasting food turned into a creative drive and a personal imperative to use food wisely and respectfully—not just in the buying and cooking of it, but in the aftermath of the buying and cooking of it. The fact that we have two compost bins means that we are virtually assured of putting almost all our food matter to use versus waste. But the barrels get amazingly full very fast. And truly, if I put into the compost a potentially edible morsel of food, it bothers me. Couldn’t I have done something with that?

It would be inaccurate to say that guilt isn’t lurking as an underlying emotion here. And I will never be as zealous as Peter, who will try to save the one teaspoon of flesh from a tomato that has nearly completely rotted on the vine. (Sam was down here last week and saw me, in a fit of spouse-infection, actually trying to do this myself; he arched an eyebrow and said, “Therese — compost it.” Whew! Thanks, Sam for rescuing me from that vortex.)

But I’ve come to understand my save-the-food mentality as a kind of moral and political stance that I have chosen for myself: never take food for granted. In a practical sense, what I have done is turn the whole issue of food-use into a kind of cooking game: What do you do with [fill in food scrap name here]? (You can sing this to the tune of What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?)

So, from time to time, I’m going to use this blog to share some of the ways that I reuse food that might otherwise be headed for the compost. (I’m hoping Louise and Andrew will contribute their uses as well; and of course, readers of this blog are most encouraged to share their saved-from-the-scrapheap recipes.) I’ve already posted one recipe for what I call compost stock. Here’s one for the moldering food stuff that I hate the most: sour milk.

At Last: Pumpkin Seeds Worth Eating

I had given up on saving and toasting pumpkin seeds. The hard, tasteless things never did it for me. Until now. I feel like I've stumbled on a secret long after everyone else. All those seeds from our pumpkins past tossed out while people around the country were munching away. No more. The secret? Boil first before toasting. We tested our toasted seeds by tossing them with different spices: Curry powder, cumin, or powdered habanero.

Recipe discovered on simplyrecipes.com.

Toasted Pumpkin Seeds

Ingredients

• One medium sized pumpkin
• Salt
• Olive oil

Method

1 Preheat oven to 400°F. Cut open the pumpkin and use a strong metal spoon to scoop out the insides. Separate the seeds from the stringy core. Rinse the seeds.
2 In a small saucepan, add the seeds to water, about 2 cups of water to every half cup of seeds. Add a half tablespoon of salt for every cup of water (more if you like your seeds saltier). Bring to a boil. Let simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and drain.
3 Spread about a tablespoon of olive oil over the bottom of a roasting pan. Spread the seeds out over the roasting pan, all in one layer. Bake on the top rack until the seeds begin to brown, 10-20 minutes. When browned to your satisfaction, remove from the oven and let the pan cool on a rack. Let the seeds cool all the way down before eating. Either crack to remove the inner seed (a lot of work and in my opinion, unnecessary) or eat whole.

My Favorite Cookbooks

I basically have put a moratorium on new cookbooks. I just don't need anymore. I'll make an occasional exception (my stepdaughters have each given me EXCELLENT cookbooks I didn't ask for: Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Vegetables) but mostly I just stick to what I have and they all have plenty to teach me.

My two most instructive books are Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (that includes meat) and Julia Child's The Way to Cook (which, rather than Mastering the Art of French Cooking, is my Julia bible). If I'm encountering a new cut of meat or some other new element in my cooking, I always consult both of them ("What would Mark and Julia do?") to understand the principles of the challenge in front of me.

But the cookbook that I turn to over and over again that has never failed me -- especially for dinner parties -- is Patricia Wells' Bistro Cookbook. (By the way, all of these books are available in the Urbal Tea Store.)

I was reminded of how much I love this book last night when I made her tarte tartin aux poires (a tart tartin with pears instead of apples) for my stepdaughter and her 16-month old who came to dinner last night. It was an amazing tart, I must say, and even though Paloma was very busy bouncing balls and running back and forth, she still had the wherewithal to return to her mother for "more" bites of tart.

Wells gives you really great guidance (for instance, on how to get the pears nice and brown and carmelized without burning them) and she makes things easier rather than harder (for instance, she has you pour the pears into a casserole for baking in the oven with the crust, rather than in the cast iron pan, which is so heavy to flip over when the time comes).

I have never done a recipe in that book that didn't work, which I think is highest praise for a cookbook: her leg of lamb roasted over a gratin of vegetables (I've modified the recipe so that it's root vegetables) is the surest dinner party winner I've made; her golden cream and apple tart is the best apple pie I've ever had; the pissaldiere comes out perfect each time; and her recipe for Madame Cartet's potato gratin is as good as you'll get if you go to the bistro of the same name in Paris (which I did and, while being in Paris definitely improved the dish, Wells' recipe is astonishingly true to the original).

My dearest friend from high school, Barb, who is the best entertainer I know, swears by Wells' creme brulée, which I haven't made (yet). Barb, in many ways, was my first inspiration for wanting to cook. I recall being at a party she was giving, and she looked at people devouring the offerings on her buffet table and said to me, "God, I get such pleasure out of watching people eat my food." I caught the cooking bug, I think, at that moment. And when I make something from Bistro Cooking, I know exactly what Barb meant.

P.S. I think the other best cookbook I own came from Barb, years ago: Marian Morash's The Victory Garden Cookbook. It is my bible on vegetables: how to freeze or otherwise preserve them; understanding yields; basic treatments for them (for instance, how many minutes to steam a green bean vs. a lima bean). If you have an urban or suburban vegetable garden, this book is indispensable.

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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