So I have something of a peach emergency. I made an order on Philly Foodworks where I wasn’t paying attention and what I thought would be the usual sensible selection of peaches was more than six pounds of peaches, some of them kind of mealy white peaches that need to be used now.
I love peaches, but this calls for cookbooks and some cooking invention, it’s way beyond what you can stuff in your mouth over three or four days in ordinary fruit-eating.
One use that was easy to take care of is that I peeled and stuffed about five white peaches into a chile-sauce fermenting jar. I already knew I had to pull off some of the hot peppers in my garden and I’d ordered some others, so I did the peaches, the chiles, some mint, some limes, and a couple of ripe tomatoes plus the usual salt, water and vinegar. It doesn’t have the crazy-hot Carolina Reapers of some previous batches because they mysteriously have not flowered at all this year despite being pretty big and vigorous looking as plants. Go figure.
Still leaves me a lot of peaches, since I’m not making a pure fermented peach sauce. (Somehow not at all an appealing thought.) So I took a look through a lot of my cookbooks. The expected dessert recipes and some others. I was looking for recipes that will stretch into the week as well as for tonight.
Tonight is a bit of a challenge also because my first decision was that I would make a peach-tomato barbecue sauce for some lamb ribs I’m grilling. I’ll figure that out myself. That immediately is checkmate for some possible peach side dishes, most particularly the classic salad combination of peaches and tomatoes—I just think everything is going to be too damn peachy if I go that way.
Flipping through my books—and the New York Times cooking app—I’ve come up with some recipes that I think will serve my goals. (Surprising discovery #1, though: Momofuku doesn’t have a peach recipe, despite the peach on the cover. Come on, David Chang!)
The first is a peach relish in Sheila Lukins’ USA Cookbook. Or maybe I’ll make the peach preserves recipe in the NYT app, that also seems appealing. Not both. One or the other I’ll serve with a pork belly hash I’m making later in the week. The second are some buttermilk-peach popsicles in Marcus Samuelsson’s The Rise—some kind of peach ice cream is another possibility, or making the Samuelsson recipe by Cheryl Day into ice cream. The tougher choice is a peach dessert for tonight, where I have plenty of choices: a pain-perdu (basically, a bread pudding) that seems appealing or a brown-sugar shortcake with some brandied peaches (good because I do have a jar of clotted cream in the fridge). There’s an Ottolenghi peach galette in the app that seems appealing in terms of the tastes involved (chile, cardamom, etc.) but it also seems involved in another sense—I’m not sure I’m up for the prep hassles it entails given the rest of what I’m making.
Peach problems! All of this sounds good, though.