The Teaches of Peaches

Peaches! Nature’s candy, dontcha know? (I think actually that is beets, but peaches are good too.) Colorado is famous for its peaches, and we wanted to take full advantage of that. At the farmer’s market we frequent, there is a vendor who sells delicious and expensive palisades peaches. This takes place in mid-August, by the way. We are still kind of behind with our blog.

We had tried, with the help of our friend Molly, to procure a box (approx. 25 lbs) of “seconds” peaches (peaches that aren’t perfect enough to sell for their usual $1.50 each) at the farmer’s market for the previous two weeks with no luck. The first time, the vendor said that we had to get there before 9. Molly went the next week at 8:30 and said you had to get there before 8. So the following week I got up early and made it to the farmer’s market at about 7:45. They must have had 25 boxes for sale. I paid and brought them home. Some of them looked kind of funky, some just bruised, some with no visible defects at all.

Our plan was peach salsa and cobbler. For the salsa, we wanted something pretty spicy while maintaining a sweet peachy flavor and we found what appeared to be a reasonable recipe online for peach salsa. So Molly, Dave, and Renee proceeded to listen to music, dance around the kitchen, and make peach treats. The first step was to remove the skin from all of the peaches. This was quite an ordeal. Supposedly, you should be able to dunk a peach in boiling water and the skin comes right off. This is not so true with peaches that are less than ripe. We had to peel them all by hand. How many we do not know – it seems like 25 pounds of peaches equals a million peaches when you are peeling those slimy bastards by hand. Anyways, they managed to get peeled, pitted, and cut. Salsa time! We used peppers (bell, jalapeno, and banana) both from the farmer’s market and our garden (see the light green banana peppers in the bottom of the picture? Those lovelies are from our garden). Tons of garlic and onions and about 15 pounds of peaches. Throw it all together and cook it for a bit. Prep canning supplies. Maybe we did a double recipe, maybe it was quadrupled. The great thing about the salsa, as opposed to the relish, is that it doesn’t require weeks to develop its flavor and you can taste before you preserve and be pretty sure of how it will taste. So we tasted, perhaps to excess, it was very spicy and delicious. Then Molly and Renee made sure the salsa got into jars and preserved. The first time Renee canned (see the relish debacles) she was alone, and while it wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great. There was much more salsa, it was slippery and pretty out of control. There would have been tears if Molly wasn’t there to make the job much easier and maintain a fun mood. You need friends around to make burning yourself on molten peach sludge funny instead of a tragedy. And to rescue you when you dunk your fingertips into boiling water in a desperate attempt to get a jar. You need people you like around to make cooking fun instead of work. Well, we do. Luckily, there was some salsa that didn’t fit in a jar and we were able to indulge in chips and salsa and gossip.

Half of the peaches were reserved for the cobbler. After the salsa making and dinner, Renee and Molly crashed into laze watching Freaks and Geeks. Dave disappeared into the kitchen to whip up the cobbler. It was a pretty easy recipe – throw some sugar and flour on the peaches, put them in a bowl and then top them with a biscuit dough. Our new food processor makes it so easy to make biscuit or pie dough. Then it gets baked and voila! Unfortunately, we can’t describe how good this cobbler was. It was so good that… it was so good. (pardon the messy stove.)