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?

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.

The Pleasures of Urban Living

I'm fairly certain that if my husband had not gotten together with me when he did (his early fifties, after splitting up from a long marriage), he would have moved back to the Vermont or perhaps Connecticut country. Even though he was born in Manhattan, Peter is not, at heart, a city guy.

I, on the other hand, am a city girl. (My friend Maggie once gave me one of the greatest compliment of my life: she said that even though I'm not originally from New York, I was "a New Yorker waiting to happen.") I love the art and culture and diversity and the food! And I love being the only white person on my subway car. (I should say here, because I can hear his protest, that Peter loves these things too; but there's a city temperament that I possess and a country temperament that he has, and they are just not the same thing.)

We moved from the upper west side of Manhattan to Brooklyn in 2002. I wasn't sure I was going to like it. I loved where we lived, but the landlord would just do these crazy rent hikes on us, and I agreed that we should buy a house in Brooklyn, which seemed like a compromise between Manhattan and the country. People would ask me: Do you miss Manhattan? I did -- for about 40 seconds. And then I became a Brooklyn convert.

We have the diversity of an international city and the luxury of having a garden. What could be more perfect?

But, here's where Brooklyn (at least, my little corner of it, called Windsor Terrace) has failed me: no good neighborhood restaurants or bars. Oh, wait. Let me reclaim that statement a bit. We have a fabulous Dominican/Mexican restaurant on our corner, Elora's, that I hope will never ever ever go away. But that -- until lately -- has been it.

The other week, Peter and I were coming back from a long walk in Manhattan and I said, "My life would complete if we had a really good neighborhood bar." We came up from the subway and there on Prospect Park West Avenue (what we refer to as "Main Street") was a brand new bar: The Double Windsor. They sell fabulous and diverse beers on tap. And it's cozy and it's not some place where females or people of color would feel out of place (which describes the other bars in my neighborhood).

Then, just last week, Peter comes home with a menu for the newest restaurant in our neighborhood: a French bistro!!!!!! Have I died and gone to heaven?

Today we had a just about perfect urban Sunday: the Times and coffee and Don't Cry Over Sour Milk Apple Cake for breakfast (even thought they left out the magazine section when they delivered the paper, grrr!); a little bit of work for me on my magazine and Peter in the garden; then a long six-mile walk from our house through several Brooklyn neighborhoods (where we stumbled upon a craft fair and I bought some beautiful earrings), across the Brooklyn Bridge, to Washington Square Park (where we attended a Meditate New York event at Judson Church); then on the subway back to our neighborhood, where we had a beer at the Double Windsor and ate at the new French bistro (Le P'tit Paris). Mussels and a hangar steak and a lovely conversation with our sweet waiter who is newly imported from Sacramento CA (one our favorite cities in California; he was so delighted we knew it).

I love this city. I love my life.

The Zen of Hanging Out the Laundry

It's been 50 years since I first read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," as a callow youth in my high school A.P. English class, but much of it resonates with me today, as I lead my retirement life, far more than it did then. One line, in particular, came back to me this morning, as I noticed my thoughts while hanging out the week's laundry in our backyard:

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

Hanging out the laundry has become almost a meditation for me. As I carry out this nearly mindless activity, my mind wanders and I follow that wandering with interest, noticing where it takes me. Today, I noticed that, as I often do after I've hung all the laundry, I was counting how many of my T-shirts and underpants I'd hung out, in this case, it was seven of each. Usually when I do this, I remark (to myself) on how many days it's been since we last did our laundry, but this morning, I found myself instead thinking that a week of my life had passed since I'd last hung out the laundry. From there my mind went to the line from J. Alfred Prufrock and I thought: am I measuring out my life with laundry loads?

Perhaps. For years, I've experienced a similar feeling of time passing every Fall and Spring when switching out storm windows and screens: "Another spring is here and a winter gone; didn't I just do this? Has it really been six months?"

Ironically, I've never really experienced the passage of time on those official occasions when we note them: birthdays and anniversaries. No, it's these periodic details of everyday life that seem to remind me that my life is passing.

On a more practical note: weather permitting, we actually hang out our laundry throughout the year, even on dry, sunny winter days. As the laundry hamper begins to fill, we check out the next few days' forecast and if it looks like we're going to have a mostly sunny day with a low likelihood of precipitation, we plan to do a laundry on that day. TIP: We actually hang our socks on an indoor drying rack, which is less time-consuming than pinning each sock on a clothes line. This has the added benefit of making it easier to match pairs and spot that a sock has "gone missing" and search for it right then and there.

We take great satisfaction in using solar and wind energy to dry our laundry instead of using our gas-dryer. (See The Clothesline Revolution.) And, I appreciate the opportunity to meditate, noticing where my mind takes me at these peaceful and otherwise mindless times.

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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Take a walk

We don't own a car. OK, we live in New York City, so it's not exactly the sacrifice of the century to not own a car, but you would be surprised at the number of people here who do own one (all that traffic doesn't just come from taxis and people from Westchester County).


I was born in Detroit and grew up in its environs. My father worked for the automobile industry for most of his adult life. So you would think I would have some umbilical connection to automobiles. But I don't. Except for one year of my life, when a co-worker gave me her old, falling-apart Suburu wagon (whose engine still ran like a top, but whose chassis made me think I was driving Fred Flintstone's car), I have never owned a car. When I first moved in with Peter, he had a car and we kept it for about a year and then decided that the hassle and expense of having a car in Manhattan (where we lived at the time) was not worth it.


We've never looked back. We rent a car if we need one (mostly to visit Peter's family who live among various states in New England). And we take the subway and buses. But mostly we WALK. We have a "rule" that if a destination can be reached within the hour (which means it's less than four miles away), we walk there. We walk everywhere and it has had the following ameliorative effects on our lives:
1) Statistically, we're going to live longer. We joke at the end of every walk: "That's another 60 seconds longer on our death beds!" Unless, of course, a car kills us, but we're fairly cautious street-crossers.
2) We've really gotten to know Brooklyn. We moved here about seven years ago and have managed to explore on foot neighborhoods that I know we would otherwise never have ventured into.
3) It's given us time and space to talk without the interruptions of daily life. No phones (we do carry our cells but no one calls us on them because they know we're so bad at answering them); no emails pinging us (or, I should say, me, who salivates on cue); no to-do list distracting us (well, I should say me again, because Peter carries his to-do list in his head and obsesses over it, no matter where he is).


I've never done a carbon footprint analysis of what not having a car means in terms of the effects on the Earth's atmosphere, but I don't really have to do one to know that the benefits are real.


I realize that most people in this country can't live without a car, but really, do we need to drive EVERYWHERE? I'm reminded of a funny story I heard once from a European gentleman who had been visiting a friend in LA. He had gotten so crazy from driving everywhere that he begged his host to go walking with him one day in the neighborhood. No sooner had they set off when a neighbor came running out of her house, demanding to know if everything was all right. Yes, they assured her, they were just out for a walk. A few minutes later, a car coming from the opposite direction screeched to a halt. It was the host's wife. She jumped out, wild-eyed, crying, "Is everything all right?" My European interlocutor, telling the story, just shook his head.


I realize this story is about LA, which has a storied car culture, but I have family and friends living all over the U.S. and their perspectives on walking seem so distorted to me. That grocery store that's a mile away is a 20 minute walk -- if all you're doing is buying milk and eggs, put on your backpack and walk there. It's good for you and it's good for your environment.


I don't mean to sound like I'm on my high horse here (high tops might be a better metaphor) but walking is the easiest, freest, most interesting exercise there is. And if you're walking, you're not driving. And that is a good thing.

P.S. This photo is of me (and Philadelphia firefighter friends) during the 2007 Susan G. Komen Walk for the Cure, a 3-day/60 mile walk to raise money for breast cancer research. Louise got me to do the walk with her in 2006 and 2007. You train for something like this for months and believe me, your sense of distances changes dramatically.


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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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