morsels & sauces

People, we're at the tail end of a fabulous peach season, so if you have oodles of peaches left over and you're watching them rot, it's time to get canning. Let's preserve those peaches. In what might be the simplest recipe known to the world, with the shortest list of ingredients, I give you  Marisa McClellan's peach butter from her book,  Food in Jars .   What might surprise you is the sheer amount of peaches you need for three little jars of sugary, concentrated peach goodness.  Behold: It's a pound of peaches in each jar!  However, a little bit of this peach butter goes a long way. Do you know this book, Epitaph for a Peach ,  by David Mas Masumoto ? If you don't, go gander at it right now (or gander at the article in the LA Times  from the 80s that started it all). Both article and book are lovely meditations on organic fruit farming in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Valuing flavor over s...

I have mentioned the husband's new hobby : cheese. That means I have been looking for multiple ways to use cheese. On its own, in omelettes, tucked into frittatas, crumbled onto salads.  And now: slathered onto crostini with a drizzle of lavender honey and a layer of sweet peaches.  This little appetizer is, let's admit it, overkill in terms of summer. Lavender! Honey! Mint! Peaches! And it needs just the right creaminess of goat cheese to root it down a little, to remind these crostini they need not be so brazenly ensconced in full-blown summer.   You could mix out the peaches for a slice of apple or a pile of pears. You could top the fruit with basil or even a pop of rosemary (imagine with me now--atop roasted figs). Sure, you could go these other, more autumnal or late summer routes. But this little toast refuses to let you get ahead of yourself and it insists you grab these peak days of July and hold onto them. Beca...

Peaches.  Oh, it is peach season, my friends.  Sweet, sweet peaches that we should all dare to eat. Gobble up in fact.  Grill them, puree them, spin them into ice cream, but eat them, eat them all. This take on the classic crisp is lovely.  First, it gives you an excuse to pick out eight of the sweetest, ripest, prettiest peaches you can find.  You need to peel them up, slice 'em up, and then coat them in a little flour and sugar.  But then comes the most important, and inspired part:  make the crisp.  But this time use amaretti cookies instead of the regular-old oats. Amaretti, you ask.  First off, in Italian, it means "little bitter thing" (perhaps a pet name for one you love?).  These are lovely little Italian meringues that have that truly bittersweet taste of almonds and sugar.  (However, here's the trick--they are not made with almonds; instead they are made with apricot kernels.)  You know that taste, ev...

Adapted from Cookbook #33: The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook Recipe: Peach Cobbler that's really a Slump Ever have one of those cooking days?  You know the ones.  You think, ooh, time to bake, then you realize you have no butter, so you run to the store, buy butter (and eggs, just in case, but it turns out you had plenty of eggs) only to return home to discover you also didn't have cinnamon?  Yeah, well, it was one of those days. But in cobbler, a little less cinnamon and a little more ginger, and no one can tell the difference. So this is the last of my peach-themed dishes (last week I had to take a break with cold-grain salads).  And lordy, the peaches have been great this year.  Sweet, juicy, just perfect.  While the cool weather around the Bay Area has precluded tomatoes growing (seriously, not one of our tomatoes has a hint of orange, pink, or even yellow), the peach crop has been divine. So in this final peach recipe, I have been ...

Adapted from Cookbook #31:  The Thrill of the Grill Recipe: Bourbon Peaches I have had these bourbon peaches sitting in a bourbon, vinegar, mint, and clove bath for about two weeks, and I have been anticipating this day for some time.  And here it is, filled with bourbon-y goodness.  Our chefs (Schlesinger and Willoughby, who were also our chefs two weeks ago ) suggest serving these with venison (recipe on page 208).  They believe that the strength of the bourbon goes well with a gamy meat.  However, the husband and I served them to friends with a pork tenderloin that was all gussied up with salt, pepper, and olive oil and smoked in pecan chips. Not that I have anything against venison.  Growing up I ate a lot of venison--or at least whenever my uncle "bagged" a deer.  I am not sure he ever used the term "bagged" but I suspect he did.  His garage had been converted into a woodworking shop, and every fall, he would bring in a deer or t...

Adapted from Cookbook #30:  Chez Panisse Fruit Recipe:  Grilled Cured Duck Breast with Pickled Peaches I think that duck is for some people what rabbit is to me:  frightening.  While I have admitted to not making a lot of duck out of avoidance of gamy and fatty tastes, the duck cooking has never filled me with dread.  Here's a lovely little SF Gate article on the avalanche of advice one might receive about duck.  Below you will find a little more advice from Alice Waters (who does say score the skin and definitely brine it). Alice Waters has created two cookbooks that I stand by, and stand by firmly:  This one and Chez Panisse Vegetables .  Both cookbooks are arranged by produce, so when you get that CSA box filled with lemons or the farmers market seems overrun with kale, you can figure out something to do with all of it.  [The Vegetable chapter where we find page 210 is on mushrooms, so we have to wait for the rains again be...