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.)

Anadama Bread

Second post of the day!! I (Dave) have been commissioned to write a blog post about anadama bread. This special and unique bread is most well known in the New England area. In Colorado, people have no clue what it is. Basically, it is a bread that is made with a mix of whole wheat and white flour, and has molasses and cornmeal added to give it a very distinctive flavor and texture. There are some tall tales floating around as to how the bread got its name. It basically revolves around a disgruntled husband not wanting to wait for his wife to get around to making the bread, or who is unpleased with the daily dinner of cornmeal mush, so he throws the ingredients in a pan, bakes it, all the while exclaiming “Anna! Damn Her!” True story? Who cares, it’s good bread.

You start with a half cup of molasses, a half cup of cornmeal and 2 tbsp. of butter, with some boiling water added to make the meal mushy. That needs to sit until it is cool. Then, activate your yeast. I use a tablespoon, with a pinch of sugar and 2/3 cup of hot from the sink water, not boiling – too hot for yeast! Once it starts to get foamy, you can combine it with your mush. You will add 2 cups of whole wheat flour and salt – don’t forget the salt. It is amazing, the weird things that happen to bread when you don’t put salt in. One of the many times I made this bread without salt, I cut into it and it was completely hollow in the middle! I don’t get it, because I am not a scientist. Also, it tastes horrible.

After this is mixed up well, add white flour. I add a cup at a time, mixing up until it is too hard to mix. Then turn it out onto a floured work surface and apply more flour – it will still be pretty sticky. I think I usually add about 2 ½ to 3 cups of white flour to the mixture before it is done. Then knead. Knead ‘till you can’t knead no more. About 10 minutes. Put some vegetable oil in a bowl and throw your dough in there. I let it rise for 1 ½ to 2 hours. Take the dough out of the bowl, knead it a bit, and then form it into loaves. We usually do one big sandwich loaf of this bread, but it works very nicely as two round loaves, especially if you are going to use it on its own with some butter instead of for sandwiches. Let your loaves rise for about 45 minutes – if you do one big sandwich loaf it is going to get huge and saggy, so don’t let it over-rise.

This is how it will look right before it goes into the oven. Preheat your oven for 400 – the recipe says 350 but I always bake bread at 400 – and when it is time to bake your bread, throw ½ cup of water in the bottom of the oven. The steam is good and helps you form a crunchier crust. 45 minutes does the trick for one loaf, and 40 minutes is long enough for smaller loaves. Put it on a cooling rack and let the bread cool completely before cutting into it if you can help it.



Check out the crumb on this loaf!

It is a pretty easy bread to make, and always comes out right providing you remember all the ingredients. Enjoy!


Cucumber sandwich on anadama bread

Folks Fest '09

We are way behind in our blogging. I apologize for that. So we are going to take a trip back in time to tell you about the Rocky Mountain Folks festival. This is a festival we attend every year that we can – this is our third time. The festival is a three day event, spanning from Friday to Sunday. We decided to leave Thursday afternoon to set up camp at the beautiful Meadow Park campground. We were pretty lucky weather-wise, compared to last year’s festival, which has been dubbed “Soaks Fest” – it pretty much rained continuously for the three days we were there. This year’s weather was much more comfortable, with a couple showers here and there to keep the temperature down.

We wanted to spend as little money at the festival as possible, since things tend to be so expensive – a Chipotle style burrito costs $8, with a dollar for guacamole, for example. So we made TONS of food and brought it with us. Dave made 2 loaves of herb bread and 2 baguettes. Renee made hummus and chopped lots of fresh veggies. She made pesto chicken salad, which consisted of chicken that we cooked, pesto we made from fresh Colorado basil in our food processor, and mozzarella cheese. It was great, if a little too cheesy.

She also made phenomenal trail mix that featured candied almonds (which we did ourselves), soy nuts, dried cranberries and apples, and chocolate chips. When we were sitting out in the sun and had our trail mix out everything got a little melty and sticky, which produced delicious trail mix clumps. Those were the best. We also brought fresh fruit (like bananas, which Renee is holding in that picture and also making a funny face), and salami and cheese for sandwiches. We feasted like royalty for those three days, allowing ourselves to buy one festival snack on Sunday, and going to Oskar Blues brewery on Saturday afternoon to break up the day and support Colorado’s local breweries.

We saw some great musicians perform, like Mary Gauthier, Rufus Wainwright, Susan Tedeschi, and one of our very favorite acts, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. The number of amazing acts we have seen in the 3 years we have attended is pretty mind-blowing: Todd Snider, Loudon Wainwright III, Dar Williams, Arlo Guthrie, The Mountain Goats, Lisa Loeb, The Mammals, Jackie Greene, Greg Brown, The Waifs, and Kasey Chambers to name a few. We are so lucky to be able to live close enough to Lyons, CO to be able to attend. It is one, if not the, highlight to every year for us. Jealous?

Mary Gauthier and her friend. She pretty much rocks my world.

The Art of Corona St. Cooking

This post is going to be about food. We love food, in case you haven’t noticed. We are obsessed with growing veggies, buying delicious ingredients, cooking elaborate feasts, and savoring every morsel. Today, we are going to talk about bread, giant sandwiches, and veggie tacos.

I know that we have talked about Dave’s bread baking in the past. These are just a couple of newer creations we’ve tried out. Looking back on our blog, it seems we have already talked about the herb bread we make with the fresh herbs from our garden, so I won’t go into that too much, except to say that this one was made with mostly just lavender, which made for a unique and delicious tasting loaf.

Pre-Cooked

Post-Cooked

The other thing we did was make rolls! Rolls are something that Dave has always wanted to experiment with but never did. We made a double batch of French bread so we would have a huge loaf for our giant sandwich. But it was just too much dough to work with, so we cut some off, formed it into little balls, and presto! Scrumptious rolls! These came out pretty much like white dinner rolls. Dave did some nice slashing action before they went into the oven, and they came out looking pretty professional.

This brings us to the Godzilla sandwich. We baked the aforementioned loaf, which was about 50% bigger than normal. We got delicious fresh produce, mostly from the Saturday farmer’s market and including our own homegrown cucumbers. I believe we had peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, cukes, onions, avocado, provolone cheese and mayo. This is one of our favorite meals in the summertime. You make it and cut off a hunk to eat right away, then put it in a bag and refrigerate it. If you can wait until the next day, it’s even better because the bread gets a little softer and the flavors all meld together. Really easy to do and so good. We don’t eat it when the veggies aren’t in season though, because it seems to lose something.

Lastly, we will talk about taco night. Our friend Molly recently moved back to Colorado Springs, and came over one night last week to make dinner with us. She has a great recipe for veggie tacos that she has perfected over the years. They include bell and spicy peppers, onions, corn and black beans, all thrown in a pan and let to cook down and get delicious.

We supplied the tortillas – we learned of these uncooked tortillas from our other friend Lin that you can get at Costco. They look just like flat white discs when you take them out of the bag.

You put them in a hot frying pan for a few seconds on each side and they puff up, get brown and are so much better than the pre-cooked ones you get at the grocery store. If you go to Costco, pick some up. They are also delicious as desert with cinnamon, sugar and butter. So, the veggies cooked, the tortillas puffed up, some cheese and sour cream was added at the end, and voila! These tacos were so quick and tasty. We had enough for leftovers the next day, which were great too.

We read an article last week published in the New York Times by food genius Michael Pollan. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=michael%20pollan&st=cse

He talked about how far things have come from the early 1960s, when Julia Child’s The French Chef premiered on PBS. He wrote that since then, food companies have taken the preparation – and essentially the food – out of cooking these days. Parents can buy pre-made frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches now! Yes, everybody is so busy these days working harder than they have had to in a long time just to make ends meet. But making food doesn’t have to be so laborious, time consuming and expensive to be homemade and fresh. We have learned over the past year or so that cooking can be a most rewarding and enjoyable experience. It is sad that so many people see preparing a meal as a tedious chore and not worth spending time on. A potentially deadly downside to buying prepackaged food-like product from the grocery store or loading up on fast “food” is that you have no idea what you are eating. So if you have the opportunity, get in touch with your food. Take an evening to shut off the TV, recruit friends and family, and cook a meal. Then do it again.

Quilted jars of relish

So you were all here for the can-tastrophe regarding the relish a few weeks ago. Luckily the cucumbers continue to grow. We had another load of them that all became ripe around the same time. The problem, as before, is that there are not enough that become ripe for a recipe but way too much just to eat in sandwiches and stuff. So this time we decided to supplement our pure, natural, special cucumbers with who knows what kind of cucumbers from the famer’s market. Anyways, I made the relish and canned it. We have to wait a month until we taste it so all of the flavors get together properly. I hope everyone out there is canning because it is so easy and you can make such great stuff. I didn’t burn myself, nothing blew up, and now we have several jars of hopefully yummy relish. This is all it took:

• 1. making the relish and letting it sit over night in the fridge
• 2. washing the jars and stuff

• 3. cooking the relish mixture

• 4. sterilizing the jars by boiling them in the canning pot

• 5. filling the jars with the cooked relish mixture

• 6. putting the tops on the jars
• 7. boiling the jars for some unspecified time (seriously, the recipe didn’t say so I had to make an informed guess by reading other recipes) don’t forget to adjust for altitude!

I still like it complicated

Dave ruined a loaf of bread in classic dave fashion by failing to add salt. This is by far his most frequent baking error. You may underestimate how important salt is in bread. You shouldn’t. It is basically uneatable without it. And this is from a couple of people keep their standards low. It can be used for breadcrumbs or croutons. Trust us when we say a 2lb loaf of bread makes a lot of bread crumbs. The good news it was a loaf of anadama bread – that sweet dark heavenly loaf new englander’s know and love. yum. YUM! This is why that was good. Because earlier this week Amy C. requested more info on anadama. Since dave’s last attempt didn’t end up in an eatable loaf we are not sick of eating this type of bread and are totally ready for a loaf of anadama. Of course we wouldn’t have been sick of it even if we had eaten the whole thing because it is so scrumptious. So that entry should be forthcoming. Also, we may be attempting relish again. We had another bounty of cukes this weekend. As we speak dave is rushing to the farmer’s market to get baby cukes to supplement our own. Chances are when he gets there all the vendors will be gone or they will still be there, his hopes will swell that he will be able to get them, only to be disappointed when he learns that they have all been sold out. We shall see when he returns. This morning we were very excited to purchase a box of 2nds peaches (bruised or dented ones which are half of and perfect for baking) only to find out they sold out moments before we arrived. This was after talking with our friend molly for days about how delightful a peach cobbler would be… with either ice cream or homemade frozen yogurt to top it off. yum. YUM! YUM! (that is right, YUM! X 2). So no peach cobbler or peach salsa this week. Anyways, stay tuned for more news regarding the cukes and anadama bread.

Also, before we forget, dave played at raven’s nest open mic this past week. It was fun as always. He played lucky me, bus driver blues, colors, and only sleeping.

I like complicated

These are Dave’s words. You should know that we tried to make relish and failed miserably. We don’t have any pictures to show for it. Anyways, here is the story. We had a bunch of cucumbers that were ready from our garden all at once. The recipe called for about 4.5 pounds of cukes and we had about 3 pounds. We thought this would be no big deal and we would just tweak the recipe. However, Renee a canning cookbook which insisted that you not decrease the amount of salt in a recipe even if you decrease the cukes. We shredded our precious cucumbers and added onion. Then we added tons of salt to the relish, along with sugar and cinnamon. It tasted a bit salty but otherwise was fine. The next step was to cook the mixture. Something wild and chemical must have happened in that pot on that stove on the way to relish because the next time we tasted the relish it was horribly salty. Way way WAY too salty. Ew, horrible, we shudder at the memory. Renee was ready to pitch it but dave wasn’t going to give up so easily. He instructed that sugar be added. We tasted again. This time the result were so revolting the hideous brew was spit into the sink. The horror! Our lovely baby cucumbers, the first produce we grew with our own hands – destroyed. Turns out Renee was reading a page about pickles and the whole thing was a misunderstanding.