Almond Crisped Peaches

Nothing says summer quite like fresh peaches and, as discussed before within this blog, I love me some peaches! I know the rest of the world is welcoming fall but here in sunny San Diego we continue on with our unending summer and fresh produce.

If I were to fix myself a peach pie it would sit in my kitchen and call my name every minute of the day and on into night. Even with partial deafness, I'm sure I'd still hear those peaches whispering in my ear, begging me to come have just one more little slice of summery heaven. And that's pretty much how it would go until the last flaky morsel was consumed. Making matters worse, I would be the only one hearing that seductive siren call as Martin is completely immune to talking pies. Even if we  had one he liked (and that would be cherry), he's that sensible kind of person who eats one slice in the evening and is done until the next day. Eating pie in measured moderation is almost like a superhuman power in my book.

I'm sure you can now see why it would not be a good thing for me to have a whole peach pie in the house right now. Remember, I'm the one who is trying to get control of some of my quirkier eating habits as I steer myself toward healthy eating and, please God, all the longevity and quality of life promised with such wisdom in food choices. Thankfully, Emily put me onto an easy little recipe that allows me to feel like I'm having a peach cobbler/pie without having to bake and eat a whole one every day.

When I first glanced at the recipe, it just LOOKED hard because there was so much text involved. To view this copious amount of instructions, I imagined that Deb must've started with telling us exactly how to plant the peach seed, watch it grow to tree, graft it at the proper times, glean the fruit and then start with the recipe instructions. All the verbiage aside, I couldn't believe how quickly and easily these little peach delights came together. And, best of all worlds, easy does NOT compute to not all that tasty. You know how you sometimes find a recipe that thrills your soul because it seems so quick and painless to put together but, when completed, you realize that it would've been a whole lot better if it had been harder but...well...better.

Not so with this recipe. While the topping couldn't be easier to whip up, the resulting baked peach is decadently good. Like having your own mini-peach cobbler, whenever you want it.


Almond-Crisped Peaches
Adapted from Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard
From Smitten Kitchen

Nigel Slater’s recipe is incredibly simple: almonds, sugar and butter. I came so close to following it exactly, and then couldn’t resist adding 1/4 cup rolled oats, a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of sea salt, because I love all three so much in crisps. Consider it optional; the recipe works with or without them. Without them, the topping is more butter and brittle-like after baking; with them, it is still buttery and brittle-like, but with a little more of a traditional crisp texture and flavor. Both are magical; the peaches are barely sweet and taste fantastic with a dollop of creme fraiche or softly whipped cream or vanilla ice cream on top. As for fruit, you could use peaches or nectarines with roughly the same cooking time, or try it with plums or apricots, or all soon, apples and pears. Feel free to try other nuts, too, any kind that you enjoy with baked fruit.

Slater recommends bakers sugar, which is sold in the U.S. as superfine sugar. I couldn’t resist going in the opposite direction, using coarse raw sugar (turbinado, often sold as Sugar in the Raw here) instead. Regular granulated sugar works as well. I didn’t try it with brown sugar, and suspect it may be delicious, but will not be certain until one of you report back (hint) how it holds up in the long baking time, hopefully not over-browning.

4 ripe peaches
1/3 cup (55 grams) whole almonds
1/4 cup (50 grams) sugar
3 tablespoons (45 grams) cold unsalted butter, cubed

Optional extras: 1/4 cup (20 grams) rolled oats, 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon, pinch of sea salt
(NOTE: I used about half that amount of rolled oats and at least 1/8 tsp of the cinnamon.)

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Halve peaches and remove pits. Place fruit cut side up in baking dish. In a food processor, grind almonds and sugar together until coarsely ground (with a few pebbles left). Add oats and other flavorings, if using, then butter, pulsing the machine until the ingredients are just blended. Spoon the almond mixture into the center of each peach, then press it flat, as if icing the tops of the peaches with it. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour (baking time varies with peach size), until the top is brown and crisp and you can easily slice through the fruit with a fork or spoon.

Serve warm or at room temperature, with creme fraiche, lightly sweetened whipped cream or even plain yogurt, cold, for breakfast.

Cinnamon Vanilla Crepes with Fresh Peaches and Cream

I am trying to eat a better balanced diet and part of this endeavor includes not scarfing down so many sweets. Let's face it - I'm a sugar addict and would be content to eat my substantial weight in chocolate, and candy bars...or chocolate candy bars. Why can't life be like when I was a kid and ate everything I wanted without gaining too much weight????

I bought some not quite ripe yet peaches a few days ago and have been eagerly feeling them up every day to see if they would be ready for this recipe I found online. Coincidentally, it happened that just after I'd earmarked the peach crepes as a future make it and eat it project, Emily sent me the link for another peach dessert. Good thing I live in Sunny California and can get lots of peaches at the farmer's market,  just down the street. I'm fully expecting to make Emily's recipe tomorrow.

So, here's the deal - since I'm cutting out lots of extraneous sugar sweets, I decided these crepes would be my lunch. I've eaten so many salads in the past few weeks that I figure I deserve to splurge a little and go for a slightly off the sensible eating grid for this one meal.

I'm copying the directions from the website where I found the recipe but I didn't do mine exactly the way it was listed. First of all, the part about putting the crepe ingredients in a blender - I don't currently own that particular appliance. Not since Martin broke the glass bowl component. I've made lots of other crepe batters using a mixer so that's what I did. Maybe these would be even more spectacular if you have a blender but until I replace my broken one, I'll never know that for sure!

I may not own a blender but I do have my very own crepe maker. Obviously, as the recipe states (and demonstrates via great pics if you go to the original site) crepes can be made in a kitchen frying pan, but it sure is a lot more fun to swirl the batter around on a bona fide crepe making appliance. I always feel like donning a beret and speaking french when I'm using mine!

CINNAMON VANILLA CREPES

Time: 30 minutes
Yield: 8-10 crepes

Recipe from Jamie Cooks It Up!
(NOTE - I halved the recipe)

Ingredients:
1 1/2 C milk

1 C all-purpose flour

1 T oil

2 eggs

1/4 t salt

1 1/2 T sugar

1/2 t cinnamon

1 t vanilla



PEACH FILLING:

6-7 fresh peaches

1-2 T sugar

1/8 t nutmeg

Cool Whip or Whipping Cream  or 
powdered sugar (optional)

Directions:
1 Get out your blender and add 1 1/2 cups milk into it.
2. Add 1 cup flour, 1 tablespoon oil, 2 eggs, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 1/2 tablespoon sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1 teaspoon vanilla.
3. Blend it all up until it's nice and frothy. You may have to turn off the blender and scrape the sides down with a rubber spatula if the flour sticks to the sides.
4. Heat a medium-sized skillet up over medium high heat. Drizzle 3-4 tablespoons of batter into the bottom of the pan. You don't want to get it too thick. Just enough to cover about half of the pan. Then pick the pan up and tip it on its side to let the batter coat the pan.
5. Let it cook until the bottom is golden brown. Use a fork to turn up the side and then flip it over. Let it get brown on the other side and then transfer it to a plate. Continue cooking the rest of the batter in this manner.
6. Peel and slice your peaches and place them in a medium-sized mixing bowl.
7. Sprinkle 1-2 tablespoons of sugar and 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg over the peaches. Give it all a stir and let it sit for about 10 minutes. The peaches will get nice and juicy for you.
8. Spoon the peaches into the crepes and top with cool whip or freshly whipped cream (if you are super ambitious)!

Pot Roast

I have a good pot roast recipe that I've used for years. I'm pretty sure it came from the Lower Falls Baptist Church cookbook - the one where most of the recipes I've bothered to try were contributed by Beckett relatives, with a few of their good friends thrown in, for good measure. I may have posted an entry about this roast recipe somewhere on the blog though it's so easy, it barely deserves any kind of instructional write-up.

Today, I decided to change things up a bit and go for  a different recipe, this one utilizing my crock-pot. Just to make sure I'd remember to get the meat on in time for it's TEN HOUR cooking cycle, I put a note on the kitchen counter the night before. There's nothing worse than going into the kitchen to begin meal prep at say...fourish...and realize that your meal was supposed to have been put on to cook hours before. Those are the times when it's ever so handy to have a Stater Brothers right down the hill from our house!

But this morning I did remember and got my roast on to cook by 8 am. The remembering is probably the hardest part of about any crock-pot recipe.

Sometimes I think that all meats cooked in a crock-pot tend to taste the same so I'll go through stages where I don't use mine as much. But, is there anything more tantalizing than the smell of foods slowly cooking and releasing their yummy aromas throughout the day? Just one whiff of those foodie smells makes me feel ever so domestic and in control of handling my man's appetite.

Except that today I got a call from the hubby saying that because he'd be late working at NASSCO, he planned to just go straight from that job to his deacon meeting at the church. Good thing roast and potatoes and carrots will keep for a day!

(I did, however, do my own taste test. And then I took some more samplings, until I'd basically eaten a meal's worth. Good stuff!)

I found this recipe on Pinterest. If Martin winds up liking it as much as I think he will, I'll feel vindicated after a recent Pinterest failure in the kitchen. My cousin Lisa pinned a recipe for "Tim Tebow's Deep Dish Pizza Pie" and I thought,  how could that be wrong, with Lisa's nod of approval and Tim Tebow's name on the recipe? Well it turned out to be a folksy dish that Martin did not care for. It might've been the green peppers, though, heaven knows I tried to chop them up so fine he wouldn't notice. Whatever the reason, I'm now left with a bunch of pizza pie slices that I'll wind up eating for lunches until they go away. I can only hope the roast will not suffer such a fate!

Best Pot Roast Ever
from Marie's Cooking Adventures blog (via Pinterest)


A 2-5 lb roast. (any kind)  I use a lean cut, about 3 lbs.
1 envelope ranch dressing (dried) I use Hidden Valley brand, not buttermilk
1 envelope Italian dressing   I use Western Family brand.
1 envelope brown gravy mix  I use McCormick brand
Potatoes and Carrots  (enough to fill a bottom layer on your CrockPot) I use about 7 or 8 baby red potatoes and a half pound of carrots to feed 3-4.
1 to 1-1/2 cup water
 What you do:
 Put any carrots and potatoes in the bottom of your CrockPot. I usually quarter my potatoes and use baby carrots.
Put Roast on top of vegetables.
Sprinkle all 3 spice envelopes on top.
Add the water.
Cook on LOW for 6-10 hours until tender and veggies cooked through.It is better to cook the roast longer. This will be sooooo tender and yummy!!

Chicken Fried Steak

No matter how long I've lived in the west, I think the love of fried foods will always be in my blood...and on my hips...and in my rear end....

Two of the main dishes I most remember my grandmother Simmons making were salisbury steaks and chicken fried steak. Even today I can see her standing in front of the stove on Lewis Avenue, frying up battered cube steaks. My grandfather would chow down on her tasty meals, as would I.

Tonight I even made the gravy for the steaks. Not a big deal, you say? Probably not but in all my growing up years my mom always acted as though making good gravy was something between exact chemistry and hocus-pocus magic. If Edith Beckett made such a big deal out of how difficult it could be to get gravy right, I decided there was no way I'd be able to figure out the formula. Imagine my surprise to find this gravy quite easy to make and get tasty enough to please me and hubby.  Win, win.

The best Chicken Fried Steak
Source: Adapted from the Kitchen Life of a Navy Wife

Ingredients:
4 cube steaks, pounded very thin (you can use a rolling pin to do this)
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. black pepper
3/4 tsp. salt
1  1/2 cups buttermilk
1 egg
1 Tbs. hot pepper sauce (like Tabasco)
3 cups vegetable shortening for deep frying

Gravy Ingredients
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
4 cups milk
kosher salt and ground black pepper

Directions:
1. Heat the shortening in a deep skillet
2.  Place 2 cups of flour in a shallow bowl. Stir together the baking powder, baking soda, pepper, and salt in a separate shallow bowl; stir in the buttermilk, egg, and Tabasco sauce.
3. Dredge each steak first in the flour, then in the batter, and the again in the flour. Pat the flour onto the surface of each steak so they are completely coated with dry flour.
4. Fry the steaks until evenly golden brown, 3 - 5 minutes per side. (NOTE: mine took longer.) Place fried steaks on a plate with paper towels to drain.

Gravy Directions:
In a small saucepan, whisk together the flour and milk over medium heat. Add some of the scrap pieces left in the frying pan. Bring the gravy to a slow boil and cook until thick, about 6 to 7 minutes. Season with kosher salt and pepper. Spoon the gravy over the steaks to serve.

Jody's Baked Beans

Church pot-lucks right after service are always a bit tricky if you plan on bringing a hot dish. In my case, it's not like I can run home and heat something up in those few precious moments between the last "amen" and the call to "come and get it!" -  but there's also no guarantee of oven space in the church kitchen. Usually when the fellowship begins so quickly after services I prefer to bring an easy dessert or a cold dish I can stick in the refrigerator, but for today's event I was assigned baked beans.

Now I don't know about the rest of the world, but I can dig up plenty of  different kinds of baked bean recipes - and that's before even going to the internet and finding a gazillion more. Last night I decided to resurrect a version that I used to make years ago for about every cookout I attended or hosted. I think  the only thing that stopped me from continually making this recipe was having a vegetarian daughter. Not that you couldn't leave the beef out of this version...but why not just go on to one of those other fifty thousand non-meat included versions available in my own cookbooks and on the internet?

Since Emily isn't home (yet!), I could cheerfully add meat with nary a trace of guilt. Admittedly, this is pretty much my favorite baked bean recipe and, having now made it for the first time in many, many moons, I'll probably be cooking it more often. At least until when Emily comes home!

And for an interesting variation on how to eat the beans: as I was leaving the church fellowship hall today, carrying the now empty crock pot, Jim Tucker came over to tell me he loved my beans so much he had two giant helpings. When he was eating the first batch, some potato chips fell in so he kind of mixed them up into the beans and then decided that was a mighty tasty addition. For the second helping he deliberately added chips and then happily proclaimed the dish "a great meal in and of itself". I haven't actually tried his interesting experiment but can definitely see where the saltiness of the chips would enhance the tangy sweetness of the beans.

(I don't have a picture to post because there were no leftovers!)

Jody's Baked Beans (so named because this recipe came from my sister-in-law, Jody)

Ingredients:

1 lb hamburger meat,  browned
1 envelope dry onion
1 cup ketchup
1/2 cup water
2 T. mustard
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 t. apple cider vinegar
1/3 cup dark molasses
2 -  1 lb. cans pork and beans
1 -   1 lb can kidney beans
1 -  1 lb can pinto beans

Mix everything together. Bake for one hour at 350 degrees, uncovered.

Ruth's Chris Potatoes Au Gratin

Martin often chooses Ruth's Chris as our special date destination. As a matter of fact, we're going there tomorrow night in celebration of our 33rd wedding anniversary. I love me some steak from Ruth's Chris, though I may have to modify my dinner this time, after looking at the calorie content for some of those fine steaks. ONE of them equaled out to a whopping 1,500 calories - or, in other words, the complete caloric intake I'm allowed for an entire day. I knew that, beyond the ridiculously hot ovens used, the other secret to those melt-in-your-mouth steaks is BUTTER. Lots of it, apparently, based on that huge amount of calories!

After my careful research, I've come up with what I'm going to order tomorrow night. A meal that will taste divine without breaking the bank on my allowed calorie intake. It'll be asparagus instead of potatoes, a lettuce wedge instead of the (much better) chopped salad, and a petite filet with shrimp as the main attraction. And when I've eaten all those sensible choices, I'll squander some calories on a nice dessert! Hey, your anniversary only comes once a year!

Everything is good at Ruth's Chris. Well...maybe not. I had crab cakes there once and they tasted so awful and fishy that I couldn't even finish them. Do you know how hard it is not to eat all of a entree when it's cost you as much as anything on the Ruth's Chris menu????? One dish I do love, however, is their au gratin potatoes - though to be honest, I love about any kind of potato dish that involves heavy cream and lots of cheese! When I found this copycat recipe on the internet, I had to try it.

Here's the deal. It's an easy dish to make and it tastes great. Is it just like Ruth's Chris'???? I don't know because it's been a very long time since we last had a meal there (like say, maybe, last August 30th????). Hmmmm....does this mean I'm going to have to order some of those potatoes just so I can do a fair comparison test?


Ruth Chris Steakhouse Potatoes Au Gratin

5 medium russet potatoes, peeled
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup milk
1 1/2 Tbsp flour
1 large clove garlic, pressed
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp fresh black pepper
1 Tbsp butter softened
1 1/2 cups grated cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Cut the potatoes into 1/4 inch slices, then quarter each of those slices.

Beat together the cream, milk, flour, garlic, salt, and pepper by hand just till well combined.

Coat the inside of a large baking dish with the softened butter. Arrange the potatoes in the dish and pour the cream mixture over the potatoes.

Cover and bake for 20 minutes. Uncover and bake another 20 or so minutes or until the potatoes are starting to brown on the top.
Note: Watch the time as every oven is different. The recipe called for a total of 60 minutes but my potatoes were overcooked. The second time around, at 40 minutes total, they were perfect.

Sprinkle grated cheese over the top and continue to bake for another 5-10 minutes or until the cheese is melted and slightly browned and the potatoes are tender.

Chicken Pot Pie

I recently had surgery. Everything went well and I'm healing nicely, after a few days of being completely unable to move and having to rely on Martin to do everything from help me get up from the toilet to cooking.

The first few days home it didn't much matter what was in the house to eat because I had no appetite whatsoever. In those first three days post-surgery, I think I had one small bowl of canned soup to eat. That's about when Dr. Emily got involved and decided I needed more nutrients than I was getting.  When her father messed up the order for Odwalla drinks, Emily decided to bypass him completely by having Vons deliver all kinds of good healthy foods to keep me going. That girl of mine earned some MAJOR points for managing to stock my kitchen with healing foods, even from three thousand miles away.

Friends also brought food and that was greatly appreciated. When I felt well enough to brave the kitchen I realized how much I'd been craving a good solid pot pie so I decided to make one. I'm not a fabulous cook but I do know my way around a kitchen and can, like my mom, whip up something to eat in a fairly short amount of time. Making this pie was different, however. With little strength and a still very achey stomach, going through the paces of putting together the components of my pot pie began to feel like I'd signed up to dig a trench. A really deep and long trench. In hard, unyielding soil.

Yea. I wasn't quite myself and everything felt hard and very, very tiring. That said, the pie turned out great. Maybe it was just sickey me feeling enveloped with healing with every wholesome bite - whatever the magic, I know I ate a piece of that pie every day for almost a week, eagerly anticipating the smell and taste of the next best thing to Mom's chicken soup.

Chicken Pot Pie
Recipe Courtesy of The Girl Who Ate Everything

Ingredients:

1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - cubed
1 (16 ounce) bag frozen carrots and peas
1/2 cup sliced celery
1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup chopped onion
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon celery seed
32 oz. carton chicken broth for boiling(reserve 1 3/4 cups chicken broth for sauce)
2/3 cup milk
2 (9 inch) unbaked pie crusts
(Next time I make this I'll add potatoes.)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C.)

Place one of the crusts in the bottom of a pie pan and prick with a fork. I like to slightly bake the bottom crust before filling the pie so it isn't soggy. Just bake for 5-6 minutes at 425 degrees.

In a pot, combine the raw chicken, carrots, peas, celery. Add the carton of chicken broth to cover and boil for 15 minutes. Remove from heat, drain (reserving 1 3/4 cups chicken broth for filling) and set aside.
In the saucepan over medium heat, cook onions in butter until soft and translucent. Stir in flour, salt, pepper, and celery seed. Slowly stir in chicken broth and milk. Simmer over medium-low heat until thick. (NOTE: One thing I loved about this recipe is the way the sauce thickened up so nicely. You know how you have those recipes that tell you to stir until thickened and you just keep stirring and wondering if the sauce is ever going to thicken and, then when it does, you can't really figure out if it's thickened ENOUGH or are you just imagining the thickening because your arm is about to fall off from all that stirring. I hate that. And on a day when remaining standing for any length of time was a bit of an accomplishment, I appreciated a sauce that had the good sense to thicken right up in a quick and very noticeable way.)

Remove from heat and combine with the chicken, carrots, peas, and celery mixture. Here you can add more chicken broth if you like depending how runny you want your filling.

Place the chicken filling in bottom crust. Cover with top crust, seal edges, and cut away excess dough. Make several small slits in the top to allow steam to escape.
Bake in the preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown and filling is bubbly. Cool for 10 minutes before serving.