All By Myself

Bowl o' peaches

As most of you know by now, I have been taking some family recipes, making sense out of them, cooking, baking and blogging the results. My grandmother, the keeper of the recipes, is away in the Poconos for the summer. She called me recently to request her recipes back so she could make “that peach shit.” She explained that she could wait on the other recipes but the peach shit is seasonal.  Also, ML’s post asking what do with summer fruit reminded me of my grandmother’s solution to the fruit problem. She’s not the biggest fan unless sugar and butter are involved. All this inspired me to make the peach shit as well. Even more noteworthy, I decided to try my hand at making something by myself without my grandmother or mother there to boss and ridicule help me.

The name of the dish comes from my grandfather who was jonesing for it on a lazy summer day. He asked my grandmother, “So when are you going to make it?” “Make what?” “You know, that peach shit.” I think he thought asking for a peach crumble sounded a little lame. That or he just had no idea what it was called. Either way the name stuck. Peach shit is indeed a peach crumble which is possibly the easiest thing in the world to bake. That said, I, working alone, could almost turn it into a Friday fuck-up. The only thing that redeemed it is that it’s really hard to make peaches, sugar, and butter turn out badly.  So what follows is kind of a what to do and what not to do to make some perfectly respectable peach shit.

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Friday Fuck Up: Strawberry Jammed

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Today’s F-UP comes from from Mandie, author of wtf jk lol, my former roommate and berry picking partner. We had our first college apartment together, fucked up a lot of food, but neither of us wanted to publicize our failures. Until now.

After I explained I had no idea what to do with all that fruit (and, ahem, ES readers said jam was so easy), Mandie decided to take the challenge and make jam.

The last time Mandie attempted jam, it was watery and she ended up having to remove it from the jars to recook it (big pain in the ass). So to avoid that fiasco, she cooked this batch a little longer. Sounds like a good plan, right?

Unfortunately, this second attempt ended up being “the consistency of those weird gel candles.” The fruity substance, seen above, was impossible to extract from the jars without some force and creative methods. Certainly not spreadable.

Can we get a little help, ESers? Where did she go wrong? What’s the secret to making jam look like jam?

Feed Us Back: Comments of the Week

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– Don’t let anyone ever tell you ESers don’t know what to do with their fruit. All your recipe suggestions are worth reading, but I like Martha‘s:

Tarts, pies, buckles, cobblers, slumps, claufoutis, sorbets, ice creams, semifreddos – so many options! My favorite for a taste of summer in January are jams & preserves which are great for using up super ripe/verge of spoiling fruit and are actually pretty simple to make. When all else fails, toss just about any fruit in a blender with some ice and a healthy glug of tequila…done and done.

Erica has an even more to-the-point summary:

fruit + booze is as timeless a combo as hookers + sailors.

– And Karen reaches back to our hummus post to toss a secret our way:

I just found this and it looks like a winner… I’m going to try it. I just made my hummus with warm beans and that may be my mistake according to this story (recipe included!) Surprise secret ingredient makes for sublime hummus.

Cold beans! Who would have thought? Back to the hummus test kitchen…

(Photo: Flickrich)

Hunters and Gatherers

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Recently it seems that everyone has been talking about some economic crisis. I’m like, hello, that’s life for a college student every day. I’m a cheap date. I like cheap fun. Now I want to share it with you.

During the summer, when my friends and I had to put away the beer bongs for more socially and parentally accepted activities, we discovered the great joys of pick-your-own fruit.

Like some of us here at ES, I don’t know what to do with a plethora of fruit, besides boring fruit salad. Mostly, my friends and I just enjoy being together, getting a tan, and eating the fruit as we wonder aimlessly around the orchards. However, if you are a fruit wrangler (baker, whatever they call you people), picking your own fruit is not only fun; it’s an easy way to get local, fresh, ingredients, and is definitely a cheap day out for the entire family (you can even bring the kids..if you want). Yes, I said easy. Don’t let gansie fool you, it’s actually not that hard. I wouldn’t partake in any outdoor activity that required perspiring just for fun.

Here in the Northeast, strawberry season will soon be in full swing. In a few more weeks, apples, peaches, cherries, blueberries, raspberries and MANY more will come into season, and you can actually pick many of these yourselves. Harvesting isn’t just for apples, people!

To find out what is available in your area, I’d suggest checking out PickYourOwn.org, which has regional harvest calendars and contact information for local pick-your-own farms.

Oh, and one last thing…Please, PLEASE tell us, just what DO you do with all of that fruit? We’re gonna need some ideas!

We Can Have the Mango!

Saturday Night Live – Mango: Garth Brooks

Just like Garth Brooks, Romeo can’t have the Mango.  He used to be able to consume the divinely delicious fruit to his heart’s delight, but he OD’ed on mango during a tropical hiking trip some years back (in which at every pit stop he picked mangoes from low-hanging branches, peeled and devoured them.)  Legend has it that on that journey Romeo ate a full 15 mangoes in the space of 12 hours.  Romeo’s lovely face swelled up to twice its original size, he ran a dangerously high fever, and he developed painful blisters inside his mouth.  Some thought it was an allergic reaction to the mango.  Others suspected Romeo was the victim of a chupacabra or a voodoo curse.

Unfortunately, it was the Mango. Romeo has tried mango and mango products since and always suffers similarly grotesque results (never quite as bad as the first time).  Out of deference to Romeo’s sensitivity I do not partake in mangoes around him (I even forgo that nectar-of-the-gods commonly known as the mango lassi in subcontinental restaurants when we dine together) and I restrain myself from preparing dishes featuring mangoes in our kitchen.  Ah, the sacrifices we make for love.

But when I was invited to an island-themed potluck recently, on a night when Romeo was otherwise occupied, I couldn’t resist the temptation of the mango.  I CAN have the Mango damnit, and so can you! Sorry Romeo ?! (And sorry Liza, I know how much you hate it when a fruit is the MVI of a dish.)

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The easy, delicious,  and refreshing mango salsa recipe for the rest of us after the jump….

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Cupcake Rampage: Hummingbird Cakes

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I know what you’re thinking: Hummingbird cake? WTF? That’s okay, I’d never heard of it, either.

You could call this the third leg of a twisted Triple Crown of Southern-style baking, following the Kentucky Derby day mint julep cupcakes and the beloved red velvet ones before that. To carry the analogy further, if red velvet is Man o’ War, and mint juleps are Secretariat, then hummingbird cake would be Seabiscuit.

Get it? Of course you do.

Hummingbird cake is another creation peculiar to the Deep South with an even more convoluted and obscure history. Also called “granny cake” and “cake-that-doesn’t-last,” some sources claim the original recipe hails from Australia, where it’s also popular for some reason, while others say it started in Jamaica and was bastardized into its current incarnation along the way. The oldest recorded appearance of hummingbird cake is 1978, when it appeared as a reader-submitted recipe in Southern Living magazine. However, Jamaican newspapers have mentioned something called “Doctor bird cake” as early as a decade before that. The national bird of Jamaica is the red-billed streamertail hummingbird, also called the Doctor bird because its long tail feathers and top-hat-like crest makes it look…kind of, sort of, maybe if you squint and pretend it has a tiny birdie stethoscope around its neck…like the nappily-dressed Victorian doctors of old.

What all this has to do with a cake, no one seems to know. The Jamaica story is a stretch, at best. It could just be called what it is because this cake is so sweet, thanks to sugar from three separate ingredients, even a hummingbird would be attracted to it. However it came to be, the recipe is after the jump…

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