Peach, Strawberry Crumble

Crumble:

In a crumble, the fruit is baked under a crumbly topping, usually made with flour, butter, and sugar, and sometimes oats, nuts, and spices.

All that said, I still think of a crisp when you say a cobbler. The difference in my mind is the fruit used and the time of the year your make it.

As for today’s post I’ll hazard the slings and arrows of culinary fortune and look at another late summer fruit.

With all the late summer stonefruit arriving and the last bit of the berries still producing berries, it is time to look at the wonderful fruit combination of peaches and strawberries. The sweetness of the peach, and the sweet tang of the strawberry coaxed out into a luscious syrup with a combination of brown and white sugar, topped with a sweet and crisp crumble topping.

This is a simple desert that will take all of 10 minutes (excluding baking), to prepare

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Peach Salsa

Think sweet, think sweet with a hint of spice to wake up the taste buds and emphasize the sweet. Now think cool, think crisp, and think of this salsa as a delicious addition to a meal with fish or seafood, pork, or chicken.

Wikipedia says:

Salsa may refer to any type of sauce. In American English, it usually refers to the spicy, often tomato based, hot sauces typical of Mexican and Central American cuisine, particularly those used as dips. In British English, the word typically refers to salsa cruda, which is common in Mexican, Spanish and Italian cuisine.

Mango Salsa: a spicy-sweet sauce made from mangoes and used as a topping for nachos. It is often also used as a garnish on grilled chicken or grilled fish due to the sauce’s gamut of complementary flavors.

Based on a mango salsa, this quick and easy salsa, is made with fresh peaches, jalapeños, lemon, ginger and mint, and goes perfectly with grilled meats.

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Coconut Cake with Lemon Icing

It is sooo hot, but I sooo want cake, and I am NOT buying the chemical laden garbage one finds in the local mega mart. Besides, I want something that tastes better than the wrapper… I suppose I’ll need to brave the slings and arrows of my stove…

Cake is a form of food, typically a sweet, baked dessert. Cakes normally contain a combination of flour, sugar, eggs, and butter or oil, with some varieties also requiring liquid and leavening agents. Flavorful ingredients like fruit purées, nuts or extracts are often added, and numerous substitutions for the primary ingredients are possible. Cakes are often filled with fruit preserves or dessert sauces, iced with buttercream or other icings, and decorated with marzipan, piped borders or candied fruit.

I love fruit based cakes, with mashed / crushed cherry, banana, hard fruit sauce, (apple, pear, etc), but one serious favorite is coconut cake. Most people just add coconut flakes to a white cake and call it a day, but I am the rogue chef.

What if, for a liquid I used coconut milk, and added replaced 1/2 the vanilla extract with coconut extract, then just for extravagant indulgence, added a lemon sour cream drizzle for icing.

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Peach Cobbler, Grunt or Buckle

As I’ve said before:

I love my green grocer, I hate my green grocer, they know exactly what I am trying to do , even when I don’t.

As an example, my last trip in I was shown some very peaches, I am a huge fan of these, but was unwilling to consider possibilities, at least until the temperatures come down, until the proprietor started talking about peach cobbler…

Cobblers:

Deep-dish fruit desserts in which sweetened fruits (fresh berries or apples are the traditional choices) are topped with a biscuit dough before baking.

A subvarity of cobbler is the buckle or grunt

Varieties of cobbler include the Betty, the Grunt, the Slump, and the Buckle. Grunts, Pandowdy, and Slumps are a New England variety of cobbler, typically cooked on the stove-top or cooker in an iron skillet or pan with the dough on top in the shape of dumplings—they reportedly take their name from the grunting sound they make while cooking. A Buckle is made with yellow batter (like cake batter), with the filling mixed in with the batter.

Crisps:

In a crisp, the fruit is baked under a crumbly topping, usually made with flour, butter, and sugar, and sometimes oats, nuts, and spices.

All that said, I still think of a crisp when you say a cobbler. The difference in my mind is the fruit used and the time of the year your make it.

As for today’s post I’ll hazard the slings and arrows of culinary fortune and look at another early summer fruit.

When early summer fruit starts arriving, I have to make a buckle. It is a simple and rustic dessert recipe, you can use any kind of fruit that is around, the ingredients are pantry staples and it freezes fabulously. When I make buckles, I usually make two, one to serve and one to keep in the freezer for a quick thaw and serve desert. Blueberries, raspberries, cherries, peaches, apricots, nectarines, all are delicious in a buckle.

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Sour Cherry Soup with Champagne

The cherry season is about over, at least for locally produced. As such I went looking for cherries to make a cherry syrup, and bought a large bag of somewhat expensive fruit. I was miffed at the cost but wanted to make the syrup so pay I did.

Now when I got home, I washed them and popped one into my mouth.

This had to be one of the most mouth puckering sour events of my life. Very similar to a warhead. Of course I had to check a second one…. After a bit of research, I discovered I had purchased sour cherries.

Sour cherries, unlike their sweet counterpart, are too sour for some people’s tastes to be eaten fresh. (They are for my taste-buds) They can be used in cooking, especially in soups and pork dishes, cakes, tarts, and pies. Dried sour cherries are commonly used in cooking, both dried and fresh are used in combination with sugar, which balances the acidity and brings out the fruit’s aroma and flavor. Thus a variety of liqueurs, desserts, preserves and drinks are made with sour cherries or sour cherry syrup.

The sour cherry, is native to much of Europe and southwest Asia. It is closely related to the wild cherry, but has a fruit that is more acidic and so is useful primarily for cooking. The tree is smaller than the wild cherry (growing to a height of 4–10 m), has twiggy branches, and its crimson-to-near-black cherries are borne upon shorter stalks.

There are two varieties of the sour cherry: the dark-red morello cherry and the lighter-red amarelle cherry

Sour cherry soup is a soup made with sour cream, sugar, and whole fresh sour cherries, chilled and slightly sweet. This soup is a summer delicacy in several European cuisines. The dish has been adopted by the Austrians, Poles, Slovaks and Germans. Hungarian-Americans and Hungarian-Canadians brought the soup to the New World.
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Meatless Mondays – Kiwi Pops

It’s really still too hot to cook, or at least cook on the stove. I am still looking for new and novel ideas to help beat that heat.

Playing off some previous posts about simple fruit syrups, and completes ( just to make my loyal fan and critic club, S2!) those previous posts concerning the production of ice pops. I had also previously mentioned a list of fruits to produce syrups from, but just for that rogue chef twist….

The kiwifruit, often shortened to kiwi in many parts of the world, is the edible berry of a cultivar group of the woody vine Actinidia deliciosa and hybrids between this and other species in the genus Actinidia.

The most common cultivars of kiwifruit are oval, about the size of a large hen’s egg (5–8 cm / 2–3 in long and 4.5–5.5 cm / 1¾–2 in diameter). It has a fibrous, dull brown-green skin and bright green or golden flesh with rows of tiny, black, edible seeds. The fruit has a soft texture and a unique flavour

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Fruit Syrups for Drinks / Ice Pops / Snow Cones

One of the things that tell me summer has hit Manhattan, is the presence on every other corner of a man with a HUGE saddle shaped block of ice, a ice plane, and bottles of fruit syrup. For the minimal price of a dollar he will scrape out a cup of ice, dump it into a cone cup, and add a drizzle of fruit flavored syrup.

Is it sanitary? Your guess is as good as mine. Is it COLD? Oh, YES!. Is it REFRESHING? YES!. Is it just what you need on a hot humid day after a trip on a subway with no AC? ABSOLUTELY!!!

Now we can do this at home, expect those flavored syrups are kinda hard to come by. So IF we sort out how to make them, we have the keys to all kinds of snow cones, icee’s, fruit spritzers, fruit teas, and possibly a sorbet or so…

Simple syrup is the real heart to the best cold homemade beverages. Once make the syrup, you can add any fruit juice and create your own special summertime drinks.

There are several thicknesses of simple syrup and they have different uses. but for the purpose of this post will work with a thick simple syrup, a ratio of 1 part water to 1 part sugar, and is the basis of cold drinks.
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Cold Apple Soup

This recipe is of Eastern European origin, was carried to Greece by immigrants. It was first served to me at a Greek Orthodox wedding, the cold, crisp taste of tart apples was a most refreshing of palate cleaners.

The soup is made with tart apples, pungent spices and wine. The sweet and spicy soup takes on the distinct flavor of wine. One can use tart apples and a sweet wine or sweeter apples and a drier wine, or maybe a nice bourbon. A touch of lemon is added to help prevent browning, and of course there will be a rouge chef twist in all of this.

Given the heat of this week, one must understand my reluctance to make more than reservations for dinner..
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