Tag Archives: peaches

Foodie Tuesday: Birthday Cake for a Peach of a Guy!

Posted on by
16

Photo: Birthday Cake for a Peach of a GuyDad, who celebrated his eightieth birthday last week, is a peach of a guy. His uncle was fond of using that phrase to extol the sweetness and excellence of anybody he liked and admired greatly, including his own nephew David, and Uncle Lloyd himself was special, as the only person in the known universe (other than us kids, who imitated him with a certain amount of childish glee when we heard it) who ever called my dad Davy. But he was fond and proud, too, of his nephew—enough to include him in the Peachy category. So to my father David, and to my late great-uncle Lloyd, and to all of the other ‘guys’ (male, female, or other) worthy of the title, I dedicate this birthday treat that I made in honor of their being truly swell human beings.

It’s a gluten-free pound cake recipe, essentially (as long as you check that the individual ingredients meet that requirement in their production, should you be truly gluten sensitive); I only went GF because I happened to find several GF pound cake recipes that piqued my interest and I also happened to have the necessary ingredients for this variant of them on hand. I made it with cardamom both because I think that a grand companion flavor for peaches and because, being of Norwegian descent, I believe there may be at least a hint of cardamom in my bloodstream. In any case, I love the stuff. Almond flavors, too, and what better flour to use in the cake than almond flour, then?

The topping, which of course one can eliminate if it’s too much for the occasion—not that I know any people who absolutely adore sliced, toasted day-old pound cake for breakfast, preferably with yet more butter melted on top—is less Norwegian in its overall flavor profile, perhaps. It is somewhat like a peach sangria, I suppose. But maybe I can pass it off as “Scan-gria,” if pressed for a commitment. No matter; it’s a bit peachy, zippy, happy, has a lot of color and flavor, and is pretty sweet. All kind of like Dad and Uncle Lloyd, come to think of it. PS—no law against using the icing for the breakfast version of this, either.

Cardamom-Almond Cake

Preheat the oven to 350°F/ca. 177°C. In a mixing bowl, whisk together 2-1/4 cups almond flour/meal, 1/4 cup coconut flour (I ground some from toasted coconut flakes), 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp ground cardamom, and 1 tsp baking soda. In another container (I like to use a spouted measuring pitcher for prepping liquids so I can easily pour them up when ready), blend 2/3 cup melted butter or oil (I used clarified browned butter), 2/3 cup raw honey, 1/2 cup + 3 Tablespoons full-fat coconut milk, 2 tsp vanilla and 1/2 tsp almond extract, and beat in 4 large eggs until all is blended thoroughly. Pour the mix into the dry ingredients and gently blend everything together. The batter fits into a standard 9×9″ baking pan or, as I used, a round casserole of about the same capacity, and goes into the oven for about 25-35 minutes.

My famously unreliable oven temperatures make me distrust giving anything other than approximate times and temps, and I just watch every individual dish, as I did this time. It’s a gooey cake, not light and fluffy, but I’d rather err on the moist side than otherwise. Just my thing. Meanwhile, I had prepared and refrigerated the icing earlier.

Tipsy Peaches & Cream Icing

Simmer together 2 ounces sliced freeze-dried peaches, 1/2 tsp rosewater, 1/2 tsp almond extract, 2 tsp vanilla, a pinch of salt, 1/2 tsp cardamom, 3/4 cup red wine, and 1 cup brown sugar until the sugar melts and the peaches are well rehydrated. [I warmed this mix in the evening until it was close to ready and then just left the pot sitting, covered, until the morning, so there was no question everything was well soaked and softened, but that was just because I was too tired after a long day of work to do it all that night.] Then, using a stick blender, puree the mix fully, adding 3/4 cup coconut oil (melted or room temp), 1 cup marshmallow fluff, and 1 cup cream cheese (or labneh). I threw in about 1/4 tsp silver edible glitter, just for fun. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Photomontage: Cake-WreckingI will confess to going a little further over the top this time, since I was in the mood to play with my food and it was for a good person’s cause. So I sliced a “lid” from the cake, carved out its middle, crumbled the interior hunk, blended it with a bunch of the icing stuff (reserving enough icing to drizzle over the exterior), packed the icing/cake crumb mix into the crater of the cake, closed the lid and covered up my tracks with a slathering of the remaining icing before putting peach (canned—it’s winter, y’all) and toasted almond slices on top of it all. I pinned the toppings together before sticking it in the refrigerator to chill out and set without sliding into oblivion. But it’s messy enough that it just might end up being a trifle or a bombe (possibly even a bomb) instead of a cake this way. And that’s okay. If I learned nothing else from my father, I did see in him a fine example of both how to make any situation work as well as possible—and how to play with my food.Photo: Squishy Cake

Foodie Tuesday: All Good Things Must Come to an End

Posted on by
10

That, my friends, is how the old saying goes. But it’s not, ahem, the ‘last word’ entirely. Many such good things are followed by other good things, after all!

And there are some, like the end of summer, that not only presage the arrival of such genuinely fine things as, say, autumn, but also can be celebrated at their conclusions with festive eating and drinking and other kinds of pleasurable activities that do much to ameliorate any pain of loss.

Some such celebrations are marvelously simple: when the summer is waning, it’s time to indulge in a last gleeful feast or two focusing clearly on the seasonal joys of fresh produce. It needn’t be any more complicated than a marvelous unfussy riff on classic Caesar salad, a glass of sparkling mineral water, and maybe a slab of rustic peasant bread decked out with cool sweet butter or a nice grassy olive oil.Photo: Great Caesar's Ghost!

One little notch upward might give you a Tex-Mex picnic, also uncomplicated and fresh and easy to eat. My recent one took the Southern familiar pimiento cheese and gave it a slight T-M twist when I blended Tillamook’s four-cheese combination of cheddar, Monterey Jack, Queso Quesadero and Asadero cheeses with chipotle salsa and a little butter to hold it all together smoothly. Then I layered this cheese spread with sliced smoked turkey breast between soft white corn tortillas into a little stacked torta. This little goodie makes a nice treat of a light lunch with some equally Tex-Mex pickled okra and a batch of fresh vegetables and other finger foods like black olives, cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, carrot and celery sticks, and so forth. All washed down with some cold iced tea or fresh-squeezed lemonade, it helps take the edge off of losing summer for the year.Photo: Tex-Mex Pimiento Cheese Torta

If that’s not quite enough, there is always the warm glow that comes from indulging in the most perfectly ripe and gorgeous late-season produce in all its naked glory. Really, is there anything more soothing and refreshing and lovely than biting into a peak-ripe pear or apple or peach and letting its juice just slide down your throat like a mystical elixir of life?Photo: Peaches

Well, okay, there is that possibility of punching up the effect just a tiny bit further by letting slices of that sweet, juicy fruit swim lazily in a pool of lemon- or limeade, a light and sparkly soda, or (as pictured) a marvelous chilled—even, if it’s as hot outside as it was on the pictured occasion—gasp, iced! rosé or white wine. Sipping the very slightly infused drink until those lovely, tender bits of fruit are easier to catch and eat; that is a mighty nice way to bid a fond farewell to the tag-end of summertime. And if you’re a mom or host who appreciates kids’ need to fish out the pieces of fruit with their already sticky hands, that’s great, but you can always put the fruit chunks on skewers, freeze them into fruit-sicles, and use them first as drink chilling stirrers, then as dainty fruit pops. All quite in keeping with the background music of the sprinkler running one last time and the neighbors’ lawn mower getting one last bite out of the grass. Photo: Iced Peaches in Rosé

Foodie Tuesday: Mixed Grill Girl

Posted on by
2

I’m married to a person whose fondness for vegetables is, shall we say, somewhat limited. Fruits, yes; starches, yes; seafoods and meats, yes and yes. Veg, not so much. He’ll eat some quite willingly, but he’d make a fairly poor version of a vegetarian. Me, I love many kinds of vegetables, along with all of the other foods, but I am a pescetarian and carnivore as well, so I don’t mind having the occasional festival of meat kind of meal.photo

We had a friend join us for dinner today, a person whose leanings are not far different from my spousal-person’s, so it seemed like a fine time to indulge in a freezer-freeing festival of the mainly meat sort. I had a small but solid hunk of grass-fed beef waiting to be enjoyed, a quartet of all-natural bratwurst all ready for a taste test, and the goofy woven square of bacon lying atop my cheesy potato-mash dish in the freezer drawer in quiescent quiet to prepare for use as well. Now I have a lot of space that I didn’t have in the freezer. Of course, I’ve got quite a bit less space in my innards at the moment than before. Yup.photo

So we had our mixed-grill meal together and had fun. Bratwurst, simmered for a long time in a bottle of Shiner Bock, until the beer was syrupy and the sausages fully cooked. The potato mash was quickly heated through and ready to go to table. The beef got cut up into small steaks and pan-seared in avocado oil, with just a little sea salt. Yes, we did in fact have a vegetable, too: peas. Tiny peas, steamed and served with lemon-mint butter, sweet salted butter mixed with minced fresh mint leaves and grated lemon zest.

All of this certainly sated the hunger for savories. That can, in turn, trigger the sweet tooth response. So there was dessert. Probably the richest version of a chocolate pudding I’ve concocted to date, dressed with honeyed peach slices.photo

Rich Chocolate Pudding & Peaches

Pudding: blend 3/4 to one cup each of whole milk yogurt and coconut milk, about 1/4 cup of raw honey, a pinch of salt, a splash each of orange liqueur (homemade months ago from mandarins, juice and zest both, with toasted coconut and brown sugar and vodka), vanilla and almond extracts, and three large eggs, and cook them gently until thickened. Add a bunch of yummy dark chocolate pieces and melt them down. I used 14 pieces of Dove dark chocolate, and just let the residual heat of the thickened custard melt them as I stirred. The coconut milk left the mixture just a tad less than perfectly smooth, so I used the stick blender to make it all silky. A stint in the fridge before dessert time finished the thickening and glossing and it was all ready to serve.

With topping. I took 2 cups of sliced frozen peaches and cooked them gently with a pinch of salt, 2 tablespoons each of butter and honey, a teaspoon of almond extract, and spices to taste (I used allspice and cardamom). Spooned at room temperature over the chilled pudding, they gave just enough brightness and freshness to jazz up the rich pudding and fool me into thinking I wasn’t overindulging in dessert after overindulging in dinner. My style entirely, and I think you do know what I mean. Sorry? Not the teeniest whit.

Foodie Tuesday: Culinary Iterations

Posted on by
10

You know that one of my favorite things in cooking is when one meal or dish is flexible enough for the leftovers to be transformed into a different version for the next meal or dish without too much difficulty. Cooking once for two or more meals is preferable! This time it was easy to use several parts of the meal and tweak them into a couple of different modes for the following days.

photoDay One’s version was a steak dinner. The beef steaks were cooked sous vide with plain butter, salt and pepper and then pan-seared for caramelization, the pan deglazed with red wine for jus. Asparagus was steamed and refrigerated before a quick last-minute sear in toasted sesame oil and soy sauce and tossed with a sprinkle of sesame seeds for serving. Russet and sweet potatoes were cubed and oven roasted in butter, salt and pepper. And a room-temperature salad of sweet kernel corn had crisped bacon bits, diced and seeded tomatoes, butter and lemon juice and lemon pepper seasoning it. Dessert was a soft lemon verbena custard (just eggs, cream steeped with a big handful of fresh verbena leaves from the patio plant, vanilla, honey and a pinch of salt) topped with fresh strawberries in honey.photo

Next morning’s iteration: chop the remaining asparagus into small pieces, mix it with the leftover corn salad, stir in two eggs, pour it all into a buttered microwave-proof bowl, put a couple of small squares of sharp cheddar cheese on top, cover it to prevent spatter, and microwave this instant-omelet on High for about 4-6 minutes (‘waves vary) until done. Fast and tasty. photoDessert, later that day: another dish of lemon verbena custard, stirred with a tot of almond extract and a little ground cardamom and topped with sliced almonds and peaches. The beef was all gone at the end of the first meal, but even a few roasted potatoes of both kinds were left and made a fine mash with just a little extra butter and cream, and kept in the fridge for another meal yet. All this from one main preparation. Food is good. When it’s good enough, even better to get second helpings with ease.

photo

Foodie Tuesday: Quick Fixes & Peach Treats

Posted on by
4

I enjoy a good paella, when I can get my hands (and teeth) on it. But it’s not one of those things that in its truer forms can exactly be thrown together in a trice just because I happen to get an urge for it. But, being a fan of fried rice as well, I have been known to think to myself that there might be a hybrid incorporating a bit of both processes that gives me a plate full of paella-like food in a hurry and at least tide me over until the occasion for the real deal arises again. Having so often kept a batch of cooked rice at the ready in our refrigerator, not to mention the gifts of freezer, dried goods and canned foods, I had at least a reasonable chance of putting a faint facsimile of paella on the table at speed.photoPretend Paella

For this highly simplified variant, I made the batch of rice with a blend of broth and dry sherry and a pinch of saffron (should have used a bigger pinch, though). On top of it I put a very simple combination, which while it didn’t replicate paella closely, was reminiscent enough of that grand dish that it served as a reasonable place-holder until I can once more indulge in a beautiful slow-simmered paella. This time, I chose to saute a half cup of diced celeriac (celery root) and a cup of roughly chopped carrots in bacon fat, add a generous cup of sliced chorizo, heat that through, and add about a dozen or more large peeled, cleaned uncooked shrimp, adding water or broth or sherry as needed to keep everything plump and moist while cooking through and caramelizing a little. I didn’t season this further because the bacon fat and well-seasoned chorizo gave everything plenty of flavor. At the last moment, I stirred in a good three cups or so of the cooked rice and a cup of frozen peas, blending it all together just until the peas were heated through. One pot meal, with a touch of nostalgia, and as ever, infinite possible variations depending upon what’s in the kitchen waiting for me.

Having eaten this light and refreshing meal in warm weather, we didn’t need much except some cool drinks (icy water and a bit of cold sangria and chilled Sauvignon Blanc worked well for us three on the particular occasion), but we weren’t so over-filled that we weren’t of a mind to have dessert as well. A one-dish meal, after all, has a reasonable chance of not making diners feel coma-proximal. The afternoon trip to the grocery store, the one wherein I ascertained that there was no giant inspiration that steered me away from my thoughts of insta-paella, did inspire me with the produce section’s wafting scents of fresh fruit, and the image of underripe peaches made me salivate for the late-season ones not yet on hand.digital artworkSo I shamelessly fell back on preserved peaches for dessert shaping. The strawberries in the store had come into seasonal ripeness, but had clearly already been snapped up by earlier shoppers, so although the slightly over-aged ones remaining smelled sweet enough, the flies perched on them were a deterrent as well. Those, then, were substituted for by some freeze-dried strawberries. A ragtag pantry is not a problem in nearly the way that a lack of pantry would be, after all.

Coconut Soft Custard with Peach-Berry Coulis

While we sat eating our Pretend Paella, I had a cup of freeze-dried strawberry slices macerating in the liquid from a pint of canned-in-juice peach slices in the fridge. Also in the refrigerator waiting was a soft custard: one can of coconut milk, three eggs, two teaspoons of vanilla paste, and a half cup each of dark rum and dark maple syrup, and a pinch of salt, then whipped up and heated until slightly thickened, cooling and setting up in the fridge to thicken more fully. After supper, dessert finalizing was simply a matter of pureeing the strawberries in their liquid plus a cup of the peach slices into a smooth coulis, spooning the puree and custard in layers into dessert dishes, and topping them with a sprinkle of toasted sweetened coconut. In theory, this will serve five or six people, but we three are not theoretical exemplars by a long shot, so I’ll just say the dessert was as completely gone after our attacks as the rice dish had been earlier. Proper portions? You be the judge.photo

Foodie Tuesday: Pork Chops Go with Everything

Posted on by
2

There might not be any ‘universal donor‘ food anywhere, the sort of food that’s perfect with all other things and at all times, but if you’re a pork eater, it’s mighty close. Seasoned pork becomes, in turn, seasoning when it’s great bacon, pancetta, guanciale, and that sort of thing. Because it has a very mild flavor on its own, pork takes on flavors of all kinds readily. It’s a culinary chameleon, becoming subtle, spicy, bold, sweet or savory; takes readily to being ground, sliced, shredded; blends with other meats or fruits or vegetables, and once prepared, is delicious cold or hot. Large numbers and quantities of flavoring agents make pork delicious, but it’s pretty grand with very little added as well.

photoSo there’s this dinner, then, where thick pork chops, though lean and not heavily flavored, become the centerpiece of the meal. They’re cooked simply, sous vide, with butter and salt and pepper, and seared at the last. When I cut open the sous vide packets to pat dry and sear the chops, I collected the juices in a pitcher, covered it and microwaved it to cook and thicken them, then blended them with a spoonful of [Kewpie brand] wasabi mayonnaise to make a warm sauce for serving with the pork. Some oven roasted wedges of Russet potatoes with a hint of coconut oil and salt sopped up the sauce that spilled over from the chops. Coleslaw being a consistent favorite in our house (as you’ve undoubtedly figured out long since if you visit here at all often), there was some in this dinner, garnished with black sesame seeds for a little visual pizzazz.

photoFor additional sides, there was a fruit compote of sliced and peeled apples, canned-in-juice peach slices, a little butter, honey and cinnamon and a pinch each of ground cardamom and cloves, and a tiny salad for each diner of avocado mash with lemon, cumin, lemon zested salt and a little bit of butter, each hearty-spoonful-sized helping topped with a small tomato and a dainty flower. Between these, there was a bit of piquancy and juice, color and textural variety so that all of them helped to keep the chops from seeming dull or predictable.

photoDessert couldn’t have been much simpler. Cream, whipped until Chantilly-soft with a touch of almond extract and then blended with an equal amount of lemon curd (I had some ready-made curd in the refrigerator) was served as a lemony mousse topped with a couple of small pieces of home-candied peel and a handful of toasted sweetened coconut. Really heady stuff. The end.

Foodie Tuesday: What’s the Difference between an Old Smoothie and Desiccation?

Posted on by
6

photo

What does it matter whether I’m an old smoothie or just desiccated with age?

There’s no time of year that’s wrong for a tasty smoothie. Since these little flavor powerhouses can be packed with vegetables, fruits, dairy or non-dairy liquid goodness, and countless herbs, spices, elixirs and sweeteners of choice, why not occasionally enjoy a few of the day’s nutrients in a deliciously sippable form? And why not, while I’m at it, sometimes enjoy them in an outright ridiculously dessert-sweet version right in the middle of the rest of the meal? Behold the Peach Pie Smoothie. It knows no season, being easy to make with canned peaches–home canned being the loveliest, if one happens to have access to them. Never having embraced the thrills of home canning myself, I’m satisfied with finding ready-made canned fruits that are preserved in fruit juices (their own or mild flavored companion ones) rather than the heavy syrups that merely mask flavor and put the fruits into suspended animation that extends beyond their shelf life.

Peach Pie Smoothie [for one]

1/2 cup canned sliced peaches in fruit juice
1/2-3/4 cup cold water
1/4 cup whole milk yogurt
1 T honey
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp Saigon cinnamon
pinch of salt

Blended together until smooth, this combination becomes a potable pie–and probably every bit as sugar and calorie laden as its forebear, so I’d better not make it a habit–that adds a happy note of variety to the meal of the day, whatever it is. I’d add a dollop of whipped cream to the top, given its rich dessert-like nature, but that would surely spell doom for my chances of minimizing the habit. When I say ‘that’s how I roll’ it begins to have a whole different meaning than I’d hope. Meanwhile, I’m too busy slurping to stop and whip the cream anyhow, luckily for me.

Besides this, there’s the sure knowledge that there are other sweet delights out there waiting for me all the time, and they’re not necessarily terrible for me either. The addition of salt–as you know, one of my favorite things on earth–to this smoothie has a specific purpose and reminds me of another grand feature of food that can be captured with little effort when one’s in the mood. Sweetness through the contrast with other types of flavor: sour, bitter, umami, or in this case salt. The enhancement of sweetness can also be relatively easily achieved by means of concentration.

No, I’m not referring to thinking-makes-it-so, though I have been known once or twice to furrow my brow in deep cogitation over whether I mightn’t be able to find more ways to bring out the sweetness of a dish or ingredient. My furrowed brow, however, hints at the other means to which I’m referring, because let’s face it (no pun intended), as I get older and my youthful juices start to dry up, my face does get more creased and crevassed. And desiccation is precisely what I’m talking about. Concentration sounds much cheerier, perhaps, but the meaning and effect are generally the same: to reduce or remove the liquids rounding out an ingredient or dish in order to enhance the detectable presence of the remaining portions. Salt, as a natural desiccant, can do this by means of leaching out juices as well as by its own salinity contrasting with other kinds of tastes. Evaporation, however, is another option and, though it’s a slower process than adding a bit of salt, depends on the ingredient itself to take the forefront, so to speak.

Let me just say that if anyone should call me a prune I would consider it highly complimentary, a tribute not only to my maturity but an indirect admission that I’m sweeter than most of those undeveloped youngsters out there.

Drying fruits in particular is a great way to pack concentrated, deeply flavorful sweetness into them. It seems only in the fads of recent years have we returned to a fuller appreciation of how marvelous that magic is, as evidenced in the skyrocketing prices and popularity of dried fruits of every sort, not to mention the pastes, candies and preserves we can make of them with little further effort. To wit:

OH, DRY UP!

Apricot, apple
Blueberry, banana
Cranberry, cherry, coffee
Date
Elderberry
Fig
Guava
Honeydew
Illawarra plum
Jackfruit, jujube
Kumquat, kiwi
Loquat, lemon, lime, lychee
Mango, melon, miracle fruit
Nectarine
Olive
Prune (plum), peach, pear, persimmon, pineapple
Quince
Raisin (grape), rambutan, rose hip
Strawberry
Tomato, tamarind
Uvilla, Ugli fruit
Valencia orange, vanilla bean
Watermelon (I’ve only heard of compression with this one, admittedly, not outright drying for concentration)
Xocolatl (okay, cacao is a berry that requires a fair amount of processing, but isn’t it highly worth the effort?!)
Youngberry
Zinfandel grape, zapote

photo

Peach Pie Smoothie

SPECIAL ELECTION DAY LINK LOVE!

See my youngest sister (and her good friend Rachel Myr) on Norwegian television being interviewed about being American citizen residents in Norway who still care passionately enough about their home country to pay attention to and vote in the elections. [Both the live/filmed interview and the print one are in Norwegian, but they aren’t terribly hard to decipher, really. Plus, you get to see my beautiful sister. Bonus!]

http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/distrikt/sorlandet/1.8381396

Foodie Tuesday: Fine Dining should be Easy

Posted on by
10

Among those of us who have the privilege of eating affordably and often, there should be no reason at all for us not to eat well, too. Least of all should we eat mediocre meals for lack of time. Today’s solution: a main dish precooked and finished at top speed at the very last minute, accompanied by super-quick fixes as side dishes. No reason to make it more complicated than it is on its own merits.

photoPrecooked pork tenderloin was in this instance a dainty piece of meat seasoned with salt, pepper and butter, sealed in a vacuum pack and simmered gently in the sous-vide to a tender pink overnight–easy-peasy. If one has the luxury of a sous vide cooker. If not, I think I’d try to do the same in a slow cooker, because that’s the way this chica operates, though there’s no reason I couldn’t also steam it low-and-slow, covered, in the oven.

At suppertime, easiest of all. The tenderloin, removed from its vacuum pack and cut into pieces about 1-1/2 inches in length, is tossed into hot bacon fat along with a handful of sliced almonds and caramelized until lightly crisp on the outside, getting a nice deglazing bath of very dry sherry to moisten at the last and loosen up all of that lovely fond. While the meat is browning and falling into delicate pulled shreds, it’s a moment’s work to fix the side dishes.

photo

It all goes down a treat with a glass of very cold Viognier jazzed up with a dash of Limoncello. Salut!

 

Green beans slicked with a little clarified browned butter, and my standby creamy ginger coleslaw, go pretty well with sherried pork tenderloin and almonds, as it turns out. Once it came to the end of the meal, I wasn’t exactly dessert-starved, but given this time of the season it would almost be a crime not to have a prime piece of fruit. A pear, silky and sweet as syrup but a whole lot juicier and more fulfilling, is dessert in the loveliest of ways. Hope I have another pear handy for breakfast, though . . . another good meal should always lie ahead . . . photo

What’s-in-My-Kitchen Week, Day 2: Foodie Tuesday

Posted on by
13

Having guests for a meal can be a lot of work. Or not. But either way, if it’s mostly ready when they arrive (unless it’s a cook-together occasion), it’s a great time to have fun with friends. Few occasions are as welcome as those that include comestible-related conviviality. Last week’s get-together fun was occasioned by the impending retirement time move to Pennsylvania of our dear next door neighbors, who joined us for dinner just after I’d finished clearing out the dining room and enough of the kitchen from our week’s plethora of minor house maintenance projects to make way for us all to fit comfortably at the dining table.photo

One of the pleasures of having company is the excuse to set a pretty table, even if it’s not at all formal. While we do sit down to a ‘set’ table often enough to pass for civilized, formality of any sort is almost always as far from my modus operandi as one end of the galaxy is from another; still, it’s nice to have a reason to pull out a different tablecloth or put on a seasonal character at the board. For this day I wanted to keep things light, airy and summery, so I started with a small vintage tablecloth of graphic pale yellow butterflies on a crisp dark background and used the plain white crockery. These I enhanced with the  graceful twisted stems of our delicate Hadeland crystal wineglasses in their discontinued ‘Lord‘ pattern–which we were fortunate to have handed down to us by my parents, who in turn were given them by my Norwegian sister and her husband. Every time we use these beauties I am reminded of our family and of our Norwegian roots; at the same time, they are infinitely well-balanced and sweetly appealing to the eye, so they often ‘set’ the table all by themselves, so to speak.photo

Food was kept simple, in my usual adherence to unfussy ways. Having seen a wildly delicious sounding recipe for a California Peach Caprese Salad at the delicious blog A Feast for the Eyes, I was smitten with the idea of feasting, indeed, on peaches and was gifted not only with finding some fine, nearly ripe ones at the same store as a smashingly fat and lovely filet of wild-caught Alaskan salmon, I had the foundation of my meal in mind. The demise of my cooktop and its current unavailability had already inspired me to plan that I would oven-roast some vegetables and fruit to add a sort of barbecue-ish tinge to the meal’s summery theme (we don’t yet have a functional barbecue, latecoming Texans that we are). Thus, a super-plain green salad started things off without interfering with all of the other flavors and colors to be heaped on the table. Romaine, diced glorious avocado and a drizzle of simple Italian-style vinaigrette. I did put out small dishes of pignoli and yes, a chiffonade of fresh basil and mint leaves for those of us who wanted to have a sort of Cal-Italianate hint of the inspirational peach Caprese infused into the meal. Like me, for example.photoThe salmon preparation was something of an experiment: my doctor recommends I limit my soy intake for various reasons, so although I’m often addicted to soy sauce in my fish marinades, I was enamored of a slab of hot-smoked salmon at the grocery and bethought myself to use that as the salinizing element in my salmon prep this time. I laid the filet lovingly in a pan greased with coconut oil and topped it with crumbled smoked salmon, freshly ground black pepper, minced fresh ginger, a splash each of ginger juice and freshly squeezed lemon and orange juices, a faint drizzle of raw honey, and a little more coconut oil on top of it all, and into the oven it went. It was joined there in short order by pans of vegetables and fruits, respectively (hurray for the benison of double ovens!), and there was time during the baking and broiling to hunt up some dessert from the freezer.photo

The vegetables could hardly have been simpler: whole green beans, asparagus, orange and yellow capsicum–those sweet and fruity bell peppers add elements of both color and flavor brightness to a vegetable dish so neatly–and thickly sliced cremini mushrooms. Crystallized salt, pepper, a squeeze of lime, and a slick of my precious Stonehouse olive oil (using their luscious Persian Lime this time) and the whole pan was ready for its oven close-up too. I left the fruit in all its naked glory, except for a little gloss of the aforementioned coconut oil to help protect them from sunburn while increasing their chance of a good brown skin in their broiler tanning bed. I know some folk say to add sugars to build (or to even out) caramelization but I figured the fruits were sugary and ripe enough to take care of themselves: those treasured peaches, a handful of my very first batch ever of homegrown figs, and that living gold of pineapple.photo

The dessert was well into my lazy comfort zone, being a chocolate combination of my nut truffles (a simple mix of melted dark chocolate with a little good butter, a pinch of salt, and finely chopped and toasted mixed nuts of my choosing, set up in a flat pan and cut into small pieces) and my almond-flour brownies that I keep handy in the freezer between times, and the mellow, dense chocolaty goodness played nicely with all of the fruity sweetness that preceded it.photo