Let’s make peach cobbler!

Nothing makes a better cobbler than summer peaches. At its best the fruit has a complex flavor—lusciously sweet with an underlying sourness and a tiny grace note of bitterness imparted by the peel.

Peach cobbler is a perfect summer dessert, but my family also loves having it for a weekend breakfast along with strong, milky coffee. You don’t have to wait until the morning to make it—I certainly don’t! Bake it the afternoon or evening before (don’t refrigerate), then the next morning pop it into a warm oven for a few minutes while you prepare the coffee and assemble bowls and silverware.

Be sure to taste the peaches as you peel and stone them so you can judge how much sugar to use. You’ll notice I use brown sugar in the thickening liquid. This adds even more depth to all those taste layers and since it’s such a small amount you don’t get a heavy caramel taste at all.

I don’t specified whole wheat flour for some wacky health reason. Its stronger nutty flavor really does taste better here. If you don’t believe me, try the biscuit topping with white flour. The resulting cobbler will seem bland compared to the more muscular whole wheat version.

Peach Cobbler

Serves 6

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Peel and slice enough peaches to make 4 C.
Toss with some lemon juice, 2 or 3 teaspoons, as you’re slicing them.
Sprinkle with a little regular white sugar to taste. The amount will depend on how naturally sweet your peaches are. (One of the benefits of this recipe is the cook has to keep tasting those peaches, so make sure you have plenty!)

Mix
1 ½ T cornstarch
¼ to ⅓ C brown sugar (again the amount depends on how sweet the peaches are and your personal taste)
½ C cold water

Combine this mixture in a saucepan with the sliced peaches.
Cook and stir until thickened.
Remove from heat and add
1 T butter
1 tsp almond extract
Stir to mix and pour into a baking dish. I use a 2 quart casserole because the filling often bubbles up while baking. The larger dish prevents spills on the oven floor.

Top with
Biscuit topping:

Stir together
1 C whole wheat flour
1 or 2 T sugar (according to how sweet you like it)
1 ½ tsp baking powder
dash of salt

Cut in
¼ C cold butter until like coarse crumbs

Mix
¼ C milk
1 slightly beaten egg
and add all at once to dry ingredients.
Stir just to moisten.

Drop by spoonfuls atop hot fruit. Sprinkle with sugar to give a little sparkle.

Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes or until topper is done. It will have risen and be lightly browned.

We like this served warm with whipped cream or with a glug of plain thick cream poured over. It’s also good with a dollop of thick Greek yogurt. If you are serving this as a dessert, a scoop of your very own home-made vanilla ice cream sends it into the stratosphere!

Locally Grown Tomatoes Say Summer!

Whether you buy them from your farmers’ market or grow them yourself, richly flavored tomatoes are summer’s gift. One way to take advantage of this bounty is to make the incredibly simple but oh, so delicious dish variously known as pasta caprese, fresh tomato pasta, or summer pasta. Whatever you call it, the ingredients are the same: tomatoes, basil, fresh mozzarella, olive oil and garlic. The success of the recipe rests in their quality. Each must be bursting with flavor, so please, no cardboard-tasting supermarket tomatoes or dried basil from a dusty corner of the spice shelf.

Outside of the quality of the ingredients, you’ve got a lot of lee way here. Tweak the recipe to your taste, but don’t complicate it. Some say seed or peel the tomatoes; I say why bother. And it’s best at room temperature. Heated, the mozzarella can turn to rubbery strings. Chilled, it becomes a slick salad of muted flavor.

Here are rough proportions for 6 servings.

Place ½ C olive oil in a large bowl.

Finely chop or mince cloves of garlic. I only use a couple but my Italian friend Donna would throw in half a dozen. Stir the garlic into the olive oil.

Stack several fresh, good-sized basil leaves, a dozen or more, and cut them crosswise into little ribbons. Drop into the olive oil.

At this point, you can proceed or set the bowl aside, even for several hours. In fact, it will benefit from letting the basil and garlic flavors develop in the olive oil for a while. Do not refrigerate!

Sometime within an hour or two of meal time, chop six or seven of those lovely big tomatoes into bite-sized pieces and put them along with their juices into the bowl.

When you’re ready to eat, or fairly close to it, cook a pound of pasta. Use any kind with a short stubby shape like penne or rigatoni or fusilli. When it is al dente, drain it, sprinkle with salt and grinds of pepper, then dump it into the tomatoes and oil and stir everything together.

Cut a pound of fresh mozzarella into small cubes and gently mix them in.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve this in bowls so the juices puddle in the bottom and you can mop them up with a good chewy sour dough bread. I like to grate some Parmigiano-Reggiano over the top and sprinkle with extra basil. You also could get cute and throw on a few pine nuts but you don’t need to.

This dish can stand up to a light to medium bodied red wine, but a chilled crisp white seems more summery. Serve it as a company meal or an indulgent solitary repast, but enjoy it often while summer and the tomatoes last.

Charlene Scores With Breakfast Innovation

“Great looking muffins!” I exclaimed when I walked into Charlene’s kitchen one morning last winter.

“I made them yesterday,” she said. “Kind of an experiment.”

Charlene and I both enjoy tasty whole grain breakfast breads. For years whenever I visited her, we breakfasted on sumptuous hearty bagels. Then our favorite bagel shop closed and the search for a suitable substitute was on.

I tucked into the experimental muffins. They were wonderful! Hearty, full of grainy flavor, and with a subtle crunch that was hard to identify.

“These are great! How did you make them?”

Charlene pushed over a tattered copy of her old cook book.

Yes, some of you may remember that Charlene put out a cook book—lo, these many years ago. It includes healthy recipes drawn from friends and fans. The muffins I was enjoying were inspired by High Fibre Bran Muffins contributed by Debbie Sergeant.

But Charlene was out of many of the ingredients, so she got creative and we learned just how flexible Debbie’s easy recipe is. Charlene didn’t have all-bran cereal so she used Grape-Nuts. That was the crunch! For wheat bran she substituted oat bran. And honey in place of molasses. She added dried cranberries instead of fresh blueberries. Substitutions for four ingredients had been made with no ill effects!

Here is the original recipe with Charlene’s substitutions in parentheses.

High Fibre Bran Muffins (or Charlene’s Grape-Nut Specials)

1 C whole wheat flour
1 t baking soda
1 C all-bran cereal (or Grape-Nuts cereal)
1 C wheat bran (or oat bran)
1 C skim milk
½ C molasses (or honey)
1 egg, beaten lightly with a fork or whisk
¼ C blueberries (or dried cranberries)

Mix together the dry ingredients. Add the milk and honey or molasses to the beaten egg and stir well. Pour this into the dry ingredients and stir just until mixed. Fold in the fruit. Spoon into muffin cups.

Bake at 375 degrees F for 15 to 17 minutes or until they feel firm to the touch.

This makes a baker’s dozen of big muffins. Tip: As muffin tins only have a dozen cups, use a ramekin or oven proof custard dish to bake extra batter for the thirteenth muffin.

Since that morning, I’ve played fast and loose with other substitutions and the muffins still shine. I’ve used a combination of wheat bran and rolled oats and used Uncle Sam’s as the cereal. I’ve even substituted sorghum as the sweetener. And any kind of fruit works, dried or fresh.

Homemade muffins are a great breakfast food. When you bake them yourself, you control the ingredients—no chemical dough conditioners or strange fats or hidden sugars. You make them whenever you have time and after they’re cool, pop them in the freezer. The night before you want muffins for breakfast, take out two per person and by the next morning they’re thawed and ready to eat. Split and toast them in the toaster if you want.

Even if you aren’t familiar with baking, these muffins couldn’t be easier. They are stirred up with no special equipment. They are healthful and freeze well. And most important—they are delicious!

Real Food

“But what do you eat?” a new acquaintance asks, perplexed to learn I never order fast food or buy processed convenience fare.

I try to explain that the list of what I eat is very long since it includes virtually all consumables in the natural world, but she remains unconvinced.

What have we North Americans come to when those among us who refuse to eat manufactured or non-food foods are considered strange or unusual? What does it tell us that “non-food food” is an actual food industry term applied to artificial concoctions like whipped topping or processed cheese food and that millions eat these fabrications?

Europeans who visit this continent are appalled by the dismal quality of what most of us accept as food. "Have Americans no taste buds?" they wonder. And, indeed, excessive sweetness, unrelenting saltiness and heavy oiliness can actually dull the sense of taste so that only sweet, salty grease satisfies the palate.

The sad thing about this, aside from the well documented health consequences, is that food is such an ubiquitous joy. And it doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. Sure I can spent days creating a complex and delicious cassoulet, and there are times I want to do this. But I’ve also had a simple bowl of pinto beans from a tiny Mexican restaurant called Mia’s that I still dream about years later. And the summer I was fourteen I stood on a street in Manhattan and bit into what was surely the most perfect peach in the world. Sweet and tangy, it was so exquisite that the memory of the gaudy fruit stand, the hot pavement under my sandals, the raucous clamor of the traffic are forever affixed in my mind by the radiant taste of that peach.

Good food is a primal joy of life. I shudder to think of being deprived of it.

But how do we avoid being seduced by the illusion of convenience? Food preparation (or non-preparation) habits form and harden and make real food seem beyond reach. Let’s encourage one another—share not only recipes but tricks and ideas for welcoming real food, glorious food, into our lives.