Peaches

Peaches are so enticing that sometimes I think that I really love them with my eyes more than anything. They're just pretty, the way they blush on one side and their supple skin; they feel more alive than you expect fruit to.

However, they are also a crapshoot. Bad peaches -- overly soft, watery, tasteless -- are so disappointing and you never find out until you have a mouthful of mush. I'm a bit ridiculous about my fruit trepidation, but I can't help it. They advertise so well, promise so much, and then dissolve into horribleness with a tiny, fruity snicker.

But not today! The peaches are in season, and they're pretty good this year. I decided to make a cobbler, because cobblers encompass many of the things I like about the pie-based food group: they are easy, adaptable, take about fifteen minutes to throw together and are decidedly unfussy: it's impossible to make a super-fancy cobbler. Well, it's probably not, but it misses the point: cobblers are for the people.


This is the type of dessert that can be thrown together at the last minute (if you have peaches at the last minute.) It's best served the day it's made, warm, when the cinnamon-scented crust is at its most provocative. Also, it sort of disintegrates in the fridge overnight. It's still good, but it looks a bit gloopy.

I don't add cornstarch to my pies. A lot of people do, to thicken the juices. If you want, by all means toss the fruit with a tablespoon or two of cornstarch, but I just don't like the consistency of it.

Peach Cobbler

About 4 cups of sliced peaches.(I don't peel the peaches, but you certainly can. I don't just because it's kind of a pain.)
1/2 cup of sugar, or less, depending on the sweetness of the peaches.
1/2 teaspoon of freshly ground ginger. (It was my man Alton Brown who pointed out that you can buy whole dried ginger and just grate it with a fine grater. It makes a huge difference. The blast of ginger power that shoots up your nose the first time you do it will have you convinced you can leap tall buildings in a single bound.)

1 stick of unsalted butter, cold and cut into small pieces
1/2 cup flour
1/8 tablespoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
a few shakes of cinnamon
1 egg
capful of vanilla

Preheat oven to 375F.

Put the fruit, sugar and ginger in a bowl and stir to mix.




Put the flour, salt, baking powder and cinnamon in your food processor and pulse to combine. Add the butter, and let it go until it's very well mixed. It's sort of like dough-light. It's past the "coarse crumb" stage, at any rate.

Plop this into a bowl, add the egg and vanilla, and beat until it's a nice sticky batter.

Turn out your fruit into a pie plate or baking dish. With a spoon, plop gobbets of batter on top of the fruit, and try to keep the blobs discrete.



Oven in, and bake for about 30 minutes, until the top is golden brown. Serve while still warm, preferably with ice cream or loose, slightly sweetened whipped cream.

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Almond Apricot Tart

Right around the time when Mini was going on her cherry pie reverie, I woke up with a craving for almond apricot tart. Which is sort of strange because 1)I don't know if I've ever had one before and 2) I don't really care for fresh apricots. However, I firmly believe that cravings are your body's way of telling you what your cells are starving for, and apparently my cells spent all night yelling "FRANGIPANI!!"

Almond Apricot Tart


4 tablespoons butter
1 cup sliced almonds (or chop them up)
1/3 cup sugar
pinch of salt
1 egg
6 apricots, sliced in half and pitted

Preheat oven to 375F.

Prebake this crust and let cool.

In the bowl of your beloved stand mixer, place butter, sugar, salt and almonds. Beat until combined -- about five minutes or more. Scrape down the bowl, and then add the egg and beat to mix.



Spoon mixture into bottom of tart shell. Top with sliced apricots. Brush tops of fruit with butter. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the filling is golden brown. Let cool before slicing. Good with ice cream.

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The Iconic Cherry Pie

It was a lazy, rainy Sunday afternoon, and while our men were off doing manly things like playing pool, swigging beer, fixing motorcycles and such, my fellow blogger, Rathead and I were kicking it old school a la June Cleaver and baking homemade pie and various baked fruit filled concoctions. I will devote this entry to the cherry pie and Rathead will blog about the latter.


A few weeks ago I was telling Rathead about my admiration for pies, tarts and anything in the cobbler family, which rank second only to my love of BBQ and meat related products. The whole process of picking cherries and baking pies brings back wonderful childhood memories related to the cherry tree in our backyard. Every summer the branches would be overflowing with plump, juicy red cherries. Not wanting to let them go to waste, my grandmother used to invite all the neighborhood kids to help pick them. Various cherry picking duties would be assigned and we'd be off to work. We'd then form an assembly line and bake cherry pies for the neighborhood into the night. Each child would be rewarded with a cherry pie in return for his/her hard work.

Being that it is summer and fresh fruit is in abundance I commissioned Rathead to bake two cherry pies for me. I'm sure one pie would be more than sufficient, but in my enthusiasm, I hastily blurted out a request for two. Pie is good. Cherry pie is a very simple and delicious dessert. It is made even better by having homemade versus store bought pie crust. Either will do. My task was to go to the market and buy fruit. I had the misfortune of going during midday on a Saturday. However, with deft maneuvering and $24 later, I had 4 quarts of cherries bungie chorded to the back of my motorcycle.

Onto the pie. Please note that Rathead had pre-made the dough that morning. The delicious, buttery dough recipe is posted in the July 26, 2007 posting "Happy *&$% Birthday: Part I".

Ingredients:
9" pie crust
4 quarts of sour cherries, pitted and cut
1/2 -3/4 cup of sugar
almond extract
flour

Wash, pit and cut the cherries. Be sure to discard any nasty, wormy or mushy ones. Add sugar. Mix well. Stir in a few drops of almond extract. This can be done to taste. Be careful though because almond flavoring goes a long way.

N.B. 4 quarts of cherries is NOT enough to make 2 pies. It yields about 8 cups which for my pie was only enough to make one 9" pie and a smaller cherry tart.

Preheat oven to 400.

Follow instructions for rolling out dough. Place dough in a 9" pie crust. Take a handful of flour and sprinkle the bottom of the crust. The flour will help thicken the cherry juices as they cook. Spoon cherry mixture on top. Add about half the mixture then sprinkle some more flour on top. Add remaining cherry mixture and a little more flour.

Now for the big decision--selecting the pie crust top. Should it be a lattice top? a traditional covered top with slits to release the steam? a novelty top made from dough shaped cutouts? (cutout of pie maker's choosing). We pondered for awhile and decided on a lattice top.

Roll out dough and cut several long thin strips about 1/2" wide. Crisscross strips over pie.

Place pie on a baking sheet covered with tinfoil (which I didn't do). This will catch any spillage. Bake pie on middle shelf for about 40-50 minutes or until you can see visible signs of a golden crust or oozing juices. Gotta love the oozing pie juice.

Remove pie from oven, place on rack and let cool.



Serve with homemade or store bought vanilla ice cream.

Mmmm Mmmm good.

Depending on how sweet you like your pie, you may want to add more sugar. I used 1/2 cup. The pie was slightly tart. Served with vanilla ice cream, it was sweeter. I would've preferred more sweet, especially since I love sweet things--to the point that instant cavities form at first bite.

Variation: you can flavor the pie with many different spices such as nutmeg, allspice or the like. If you are using sweet cherries, you can even add some lemon juice to reduce the overly sweet quality of the cherries.

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Happy (*@#$^@# Birthday : Part II

This is a basic pastry cream, suitable for a whole plethora of things: filling eclairs, filling my raspberry tart, serving with fruit, bribing children, licking out of navels...whatever. You can also flavor it however you like: add chocolate, Grand Marnier, etc. But for this, since there's already chocolate and hazelnut in the crust, I kept it simple. Also, this is really easy and quick.


Pastry Cream. Or Creme Patissiere.

1 1/2 cup whole milk
1 vanilla bean, split -- or --
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 egg yolks from room temperature eggs
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon flour
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 pint heavy cream

Put milk in a heavy saucepan with the vanilla bean and bring to a boil. Remove from heat and set aside.

Beat egg yolks and sugar together in a medium-sized bowl until thick and light yellow. Add flour and cornstarch and beat a bit more.

Take the vanilla beans out of the milk, scrape the insides, and put the seeds back in. If there is a skin over the milk, remove it. Now, very, very slowly add the warm milk to the eggs. The milk should not be hot to the touch. Whisk like crazy while you're adding -- you don't want the eggs to cook.


Once it's all in there, put the whole shebang back in the milk pan and put over medium heat. While stirring, let it come to a boil, and then reduce the heat to a simmer (which you won't notice because you're stirring, right?) and let it cook until thickened, which will be quite quick, and then cook for about two minutes more. If you're adding flavorings or chocolate, do it now. If you're using vanilla extract, use it here also.

Pour into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap, pressing down so the plastic wrap touches the cream. Let cool for a while, and then put in the refrigerator.

Before assembly: whip the cream and fold about half into the pastry cream.

Assemble: spoon into the tart shell and smooth. Top with raspberries. Or any fruit. Except bananas.

If you want to glaze it, you can use about a 1/4 of a cup of melted red currant jam (for red fruit) or apricot jam (for orange & yellow fruit). Glaze as close to serving as possible, though: it makes the crust soggy.

A word about this tart in general: it doesn't travel. If you're planning on bringing it to a party, you're going to have to assemble it there. Just put the cream into a container or a zip-top bag, bag up the fruit, put it all in a little cooler and hit the road. Because otherwise you will just have a tartshell full of sliding goo.

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Happy *&$%&# Birthday: Part I

So, check this out: I get a voice mail from a friend of mine last weekend, inviting me to a surprise party on the 21st for my friend Francis. And she asked if I would make a cake. Which is fine, but the 21st is MY birthday. Just to be clear: dissed by friends on birthday plus asked to bake.

Now, a better person might get angry. I, however, chose to approach it as a perfect opportunity to casually remind people at how I really felt via my favorite medium: passive aggressive behavior. That is: I said I thought it was funny, and then made sure everyone at the party heard my latest funny story. I also made this:

Raspberry Tart


Crust:

1 1/2 cups flour
1 stick unsalted butter, very cold and cut into 1/2 inch pieces.
1/4 tsp salt
1-2 tsp sugar*
3 tablespoons ice water
1 very good chocolate bar, chopped

*A word: This is my mom's (Mrs. Rathead) pie crust recipe, and I use it for everything, regardless of filling. If I'm making a savory filling, I leave out the sugar. In this instance, I used 2 tablespoons sugar, because I wanted it to be a bit sweeter. You can also use a butter/shortening mix if you want -- it does make a more stable crust, but don't go over 50% shortening.

Place flour, salt and sugar in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a bit to mix. Scatter butter over the top and pulse a few times until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Leaving the food processor running, add the ice water in a thin stream. Keep running until the dough forms a ball. Remove, shape into a ball, flatten, wrap in waxed paper, and let rest in the fridge for an hour or so. This will keep in the fridge for three days or the freezer for three months.

Preheat the oven to 400.

Take the dough and roll out. This will fit a 10 inch tart pan. I actually used two 7 inch tart pans and it fit both of them, but barely. Anway, roll out on a floured surface and get it into your tart pans. Trim the edges and prick all over with a fork. Put back in the fridge for about fifteen minutes. (This all works better if the dough is really cold before you bake it.)

Take a sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil and butter it. You want to make a butter circle about an inch wider than your tart pan. Place this, butter side down, onto your chilled crust. Make sure it's touching the sides. Put your tart shell on a baking sheet, if you want (it's easier to move around.) Fill with pie weights (I used dried peas).

Bake for 15-20 minutes, then take out and reduce the heat to 375. Let the crust sit for a minute or two while you drink the aroma of toasted pea pie. Take off the tin foil and put back in the oven for about five minutes, until golden brown.

Let cool completely.

Either in a microwave, in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over extremely low heat, or in a double boiler (or, if you're me, in a copper jello mold shaped like a fish over a saucepan of barely simmering water) melt your chocolate.

A word: If you are going to melt chocolate all by itself, I recommend using one with a lower content of cocoa. You know how all the fancy chocolate bars are all "85%" like they think they're better than you? Chocolate with that high cocoa content burns really easily. For this, I used a Valhrona bar with 61% and it melted like a dream. Also, it had hazelnuts in it, which I didn't see when I bought it, but it worked great.

Spoon or pour the melted chocolate into the pie crust and spread with the back of a spoon until the entire bottom is evenly coated. Let cool, or chuck into the fridge for a minute or two to set.



I'll do the rest of this in a separate post.

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