Oui, oui! Summer Peaches the French Way

Now most of us are thinking like this, this 4th of July week:

Me? I'm thinking like this cat who loves art:

Who lives near here (see the red, white and blue tints), a gate house:

Which is on the grounds of here, Chenonceau chateau in the Loire Valley in France:

Why would I be thinking about France this week?  Well, I mean there is that who thing about France helping us win the Revolution so we could blow up fireworks in our cul-de-sacs in perfect freedom.

But also because France is where I learned the secret for the best fruit dish in the world. And a lot of fruit is coming in. Blueberries, blackberries and peaches, peaches, peaches.

When we visited the castles of the Loire Valley, we stopped at a little restaurant in Chenonceaux, the town near this famous chateau that spans a river. We were the only ones in the restaurant because you know it was 7:00pm and folks there eat at 9:00! I don't remember anything about the meal except the BEST PEARS I'VE EVER HAD IN MY LIFE.

Yes, they were. Since the owner wasn't busy, she told me the recipe, the secret ingredient for this marvelous dish. And I practically fainted on the spot. SO SIMPLE. She cut up the pears, sauteed them in butter, added a bit of sugar and then, the secret ingredient, vanilla.

Now I know vanilla is the most purchased ice cream flavor in the US. I know half the heroines I read about in books wear vanilla-scented perfume. But I didn't know you could put vanilla on plain fruit and turn it into a masterpiece of flavor. Biggest culinary revelation ever.

So now I put vanilla on all my fruit and suddenly I don't feel deprived that I can't have a pie crust (darn wheat allergy) along with it. Who needs pie when you have fruit that reaches new heights of deliciousness?

So I am thankful for France being a good friend to America in her time of need and to giving me one of the simplest ways to enjoy summer's bountiful fruit crop.

This week it was peaches. They look deceptively plain but if you want to gild the lily, add vanilla ice cream and a cookie:

   
Sauteed Fruit, Chenonceaux style

2 cups fruit
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons sugar (any type but I use organic or brown sugar)
1 teaspoon or more vanilla to taste.

Peel fruit.

Melt butter in pan over medium heat.

Add fruit as soon as butter is melted.

Stir until fruit has softened a tad.

Add sugar and vanilla and continue to stir until evenly distributed.

Serve warm, plain as a side dish or with ice cream for dessert.

So what about you? What ingredient is your secret weapon? What is your favorite simple recipe for July 4th? Do you dream of running away and living in a castle?


 

Peach ice cream and Edna's new friend

Hello, everybody!!

  Well, I'm glad this post isn't back-to-back with Jan's hot fudge sundae (which I'm absolutely going to try) because we'd all die of a sugar high. But since the Tex had a healthy quinoa (I love to say it- don't you?) We can go on our merry way to.... homemade ice cream!

Edna was yearning for some goodies. I caught her reading this old book. It's so old, it says 'COOKY' on the front. Heehee! We love Betty Crocker. She has very lovely hairstyles. And aprons. Ok, and the recipes are good, too.

I swapped out Eda's 'cooky' book for a few other dessert books. She was having a good old time. but what she chose wasn't from these, but rather an old recipe we have for ice cream... because we have peaches!!

The thing about having your own peach trees: they all start to ripen at once. So, two trees equals lots of peaches! We're handing them over the fences on each side, throwing twenty pounds at a time at our neighbors but still... we're barely keeping up with the peaches.

I made a few batches of mint peach compote and it was tasty. But this was the winner: vanilla bean peaches. YUMMY. (See my vintage Kerr jar? Whee!) It was out of a batch of jars my dad brought over.

Here it is before it was stuffed with peaches. Oooooo!

There were a few of these ATLAS giant jars. I mean, what am I supposed to put in these?? The glass is wavy and ancient, even has little bubbles trapped in it. Lovely!

There were lots of those blue Ball jars so I sent them to facebook friends across the US last week. They got jars and I got the peace of mind that my kids would not be destroying those babies. So pretty! I sent Julie a Presto jar... but it came back to me. Can you believe I sent a package to her that didn't even have her street address? Ugh. My brain.

 Ok, so Edna wanted to make some ice cream, the old fashioned way.
NOTE: I doubled this recipe so the pictures will look like a lot more than the recipe should be. :) The amounts I give are for a single batch.
3/4 cup sugar

2 tablespoons cornstarch

1/8 teaspoon table salt

2 cups milk                               

1 cup heavy whipping cream

1 egg yolk                               

Click to see savings

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla     

 So, let's start on the base. Mix sugar, corn starch and salt in a pan and whisk together. Pour in the milk and cream, whisking constantly. Heat until thickened, stirring constantly over medium heat. After it's thickened, set aside to cool for about ten minutes.

Separate one egg. Beat the yolk.

 Pour one cup of the cooled milk mixture into the eggs, stirring constantly. Add the egg/milk mix back to the pan and heat again until a pudding-like consistency.

 Oh, our grapes are ready! Seedless sweet grapes... Except for the multitude of spiders, we're in heaven over here!

So that's the recipe for plain vanilla. Most of the kids just wanted vanilla, so that was fine. but we had all these peaches! And I found this awesome recipe for peach and pecan ice cream!                      

1 cup peeled and coarsely chopped peaches                                                              

1 1/2 tablespoons butter                               

1 cup coarsely chopped pecans

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

 Here is some of the vanilla bean peaches, mashed. Mmmmmmmm.

 Add the butter, salt, and pecans to a pan and toast on medium for about 8-9 minutes.

 I split the vanilla ice cream into two bowls, so I could add what I wanted to the parents' batch.

 Stir in mashed peaches, about 1 cup. (This looks like more, and it was. And it was delicious. but the recipe says one cup.)

 Add toasted pecans. Later, I thought these tasted more like walnuts. Oh well. They were still good.

 Put the vanilla into the deep freeze to solidify. (Oh, see? Pecans in the background! I knew there were some... Hey, and rhubarb, too!)

 While it was chilling, I noticed Edna had struck up a conversation with this strange, leather box. He seemed sort of old and musty. I wasn't really excited about looking inside. But she was whirring and making little happy noises, so...

 There were all sorts of little leather packages inside. My favorite had its own retractable tape measure... and lenses!

 Once I figured out how to open it, the flat metal camera opened to this! How handsome is this guy?? He and Edna had a great time talking about the height of investigative journalism in the fifties and sixties. Walter (or Wally, as the kids called him) smelled faintly of cigars and vermouth.

 He'd spent a lot of his time taking Polaroid snaps of celebrities at boring cocktail parties, but his heart was in the newspapers. Sadly, he'd been in that box quite a while because they didn't even make film for Walter anymore.

Plus, he'd never seen the internet. Of course, right after the VMA's, he decided it wasn't worth trying to follow celebrities anymore. He's going to be very happy as a showpiece. Retirement might not be that bad, after all.

 Peach ice cream... melllllllting!! It was delicious!

This was definitely the hands down winner. Crunchy sweet/salty pecans with tart/sweet peaches were the perfect combination. You can tell how hot it is in my kitchen because it was slushy within minutes of hitting the bowl. But it was still GOOD.

 

 

 Ok, everybody! Have a wonderful week. We're headed off on vacation in a few days and I just found out that our place at the lake has no electricity. (Um, WHAT???) Now, how am I supposed to write without a plug in for the laptop?! Maybe it will be a real vacation after all!
Or maybe I'll go nutty.
Until next Wednesday!

P.S. I also have Tina Russo Radcliffe over on my blog today, talking about her new book The Rosetti Curse! Pop on by and chat! She's giving away free e-books to any that are interested in giving it a try and leaving a review.

Screaming for Ice Cream

Father’s Day, you know it is Father’s Day this weekend, right?  Mothers get a lot of attention on Mothers Day. Dinner out, flowers, chocolate. But fathers? Not so much. I asked my sister the other day what we did for Daddy when we were growing up.  It was a tradition to take our mom to a really special plant nursery and get her every flowering plant she desired. But Daddy?  We couldn’t remember. We both felt awful because what we remembered was Dad grilling FOR US on Father’s Day. 

Well, this weekend Man O is grilling!  It was enough to make me scream.  I feel so guilty. What could I do to make his Father’s Day dinner special? After much pondering and head banging against the wall - oh, that was when I came to bed late and Man O had the lights off, I narrowed in on what my guy loves. Ice cream tops the list.

Let me be more specific. Man O loves Goodberry’s Frozen Custard. It is thick and creamy with a texture hard to beat. But he will eat anything frozen made of milk and cream. My dad turns his nose up at cheap ice creams with a lot of gums and other ingredients. I must have gotten ice cream snobbery from him. Even so called "healthy" non-dairy substitutes are full of guar and xanthan gum. YUCK. No way am I eating that stuff in a carton or making recipes with extra ingredients to make it "taste" like ice cream.  It's better to just have a smaller serving of the real thing. Daddy and Man O both like a smooth texture and mouth coating appeal. The richer the ice cream the better. And wouldn’t you know it, that works for me. So what could I do?

My favorite website for anything gluten free is Gluten Free on a Shoestring.com. Recently, they shared an ice cream recipe I couldn’t believe. Only three ingredient. No need for an ice cream maker. Bonus? I could make it and eat it (in limited quantities) because, tah dah, Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed milk doesn’t have corn sugars in it!!!!  Again, IT DOESN'T USE AN ICE CREAM MAKER. Could you hear me yelling for joy? How great is that? But would it taste as well as it looks? I had to do a test run on Gluten Free On A Shoestring's Amazingly Simple Vanilla Ice Cream  

Random Factoid: Did you know a man named Gail Borden invented sweetened condensed milk in the 1850s after he saw infants starving on a boat trip when the cows on board stopped producing milk? Stop focusing on the cows on ships and think about the miracle of the product!  He made a fortune during the Civil War when he supplied the Union troops with the canned milk beverage and cooking ingredient that wouldn't spoil and sicken the soldiers. Soon, Eagle Brand was credited with reducing infant mortality, making the life of a harried cook simpler, and being the go-to ingredient for everything from fudge to key lime pie.

Hmmm, back to my dry run for Sunday. So I got out my THREE ingredients: Sweetened condensed milk, one carton whipping cream and vanilla.

Yep, that's it. Three ingredients.

I put the condensed milk and one tablespoon of vanilla in a freezer safe bowl that also has a matching lid. You could use plastic wrap and aluminum foil if you don't have a lid. I mixed the ingredients until blended and stuck it in the refrigerator.

Condensed milk with a splash of vanilla makes a great Rorschach test, you know the one where you look at an ink blot and say what you see? I am trying to decide if  I see a puppy or a flower.

I whipped the whipping cream on medium high until I had “semi stiff” peaks.  It looks pink only because I was wearing a red tank top that is reflecting on that white cream. Food stylist, I'm not.

I folded the whipped cream into the milk and vanilla until blended but not over blended, smoothed the top and put on the lid. Then I stuck it in the freezer. Once again, remember you don't need an ice cream maker!

Then the hard part.  I had to wait for at least four hours to see how it turned out! Um, I couldn't quite wait that long.

If you have the patience to wait longer, it will be a bit more solid. I couldn't!

Oh, so creamy. The mouth feel. The richness. Sigh. I probably should have added more vanilla. But I will be making my infamous chocolate sauce to make it special Chocolate sauce recipe here. and voila! Because the only thing my guy likes better than ice cream is chocolate on his ice cream AND his kids.

PS. I ended up serving Man O this ice cream and chocolate sauce when the crazy storms of the week passed through and I, ahem, couldn't cook dinner. He was thrilled. So there you go, Man O approved. 

For the love of cookies

Hello, everybody! The Fresh Pioneer is back and I have cookies! I didn't want to leave you with a mental picture of that disastrous cake. You might wonder if I can make anything at all! So, here is a sweet little recipe for those days when you want to impress the guests.

But, before we start, a little reminder of who is posting and where...

(Got it? Good. That's me on the cover.)

   Here is a picture of what I'd seen once and thought was so adorable!

The recipe is a standard refrigerator dough recipe like so:

2 eggs
1 cup oil
2 sticks butter (I suggest you use the real stuff, we're eating cookies, We need calories.)
1 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup powdered sugar
3/4 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
4 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cream of tartar

  Don't skip the cream of tartar. I tried that once and they were gooey instead of crumbly. We want something like a tea cookie here. Let's leave the soft and chewy cookies for the chocolate chip walnut variety.

  Now, I had this sudden urge to try these cookies because I was upgrading my life.

Yes, you heard that. A whole new me!

And here is the first step... Meet EDNA.

  Edna is my very first mixer. I found her languishing at a garage sale last week. She was $2.00 and was leaning in a very come-hither way against a WWII army trunk. I knew at first sight we were going to be best pals. As for the name, I chose it after Edna St. Vincent Millay. 

Here she is, looking angsty and romantic. She wrote some very, very famous poetry. Like this one:

 My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.

 Ah, isn't that wonderful? We still use that phrase.... But I like her because she really excelled at writing the perfect 'break up' poetry. She was raised by a single mother and had a full ride to Vassar. People were scandalized at how a woman could be so, well, frank about the downsides to romance. (Although in our world, all heroes are perfect! Poor Edna. She could have used some good romance novels.)


She was definitely one to STIR THINGS UP. Get it? Ha!

  So, Edna the poetic mixer and I started on our adventure of checkboard cookies. I was nervous, she was a hardened old-timer. The perfect pair.
 I hoped.

So, here we go. *deep breath*

With a roar like a V-8 engine, Edna started to make her magic. And I fell in love. In a very un-ESVMillay way. Unconditionally. Heart and soul and till motor burn-out do us part. She was beautiful. I would have picked her up and danced around except that she might just outweigh me.

Split the dough in half, after all ingredients are mixed. Add 3/4 cup cocoa powder.

Chill for one hour. When it's well chilled, take both parts and roll them into two long logs of dough. (So, four logs.) Chill again for an hour. Then, cut each roll in four long pieces. Following me? Yeah, me and Edna had lots of time to chill and swap bad boyfriend stories.

Um, well, this isn't quite looking like it should. Edna was cool with it. She said to just keep going. So, four long strips, laid side by side. Then another four on top, alternating colors.
Chill again. (Edna confessed everything about that Army trunk. He was strong and sturdy, built to protect, but too confining for her Bohemian lifestyle so they parted ways. )

So, after the log is chilled again, start slicing into small pieces that will show the checkerboard inside. Bake at 350F for 9 minutes. (Ignore the Prego sauce. It has nothing to do with this recipe.)

Huh.

Allllllllrighty then.

  Edna thinks I didn't keep them cold enough and they started to meld together before cooking. She advised me to tell the kids we were making zebra cookies. She says it's all about confidence. And I live in a zoo, so that fits.

Mmmmm. Shortbread zebra cookies. I have no idea how long they stay fresh, because cookies in this house last about 2 hours max, and those are the burned ones. I advise you to grab a few girlfriends, some hot coffee or cold milk and swap stories about past loves. Or broken hearts. Or just make something up.

 If all else fails you can read poetry to each other.

  Until next time, my dears!