Grilled Peach Salad

I have leftover raspberry sauce from the peach melba I made a few days ago.  Remember August is our peach month and we can't get enough of them.  On this hot day we decided to have a grilled peach salad and use some of the leftover raspberry sauce to make a raspberry vinaigrette.  I grilled a couple peeled peach halves on our electric griddler.  I tore some romaine lettuce into bowls, sliced some grilled peaches over the lettuce, sprinkled walnut pieces and feta cheese over it and drizzled with the following raspberry vinaigrette:

1/4 cup olive oil
2 teaspoons cider vinegar
2 Tablespoons raspberry sauce
A little salt and freshly-ground black pepper

Wisk all the ingredients and drizzle lightly over salad.

Peach Jam

More peaches than we can eat!  We made jam!

We followed the directions on a pack of Ball powdered pectin.  We chopped peaches, added lemon juice and pectin and cooked to a full rolling boil.

Then we added the premeasured sugar.  We boiled hard for another minute and we had jam.  We filled jars.

We wiped the jars before sealing.

We processed the filled jars for 10 minutes and we were done!   Delicious!

Peach Melba

It's almost August and, here in WV,  it's PEACH SEASON.  One of our local orchards has a great little farmer's market, Orr's.  The peaches are piled in baskets, the counters are full of berries (I bought some red raspberries) and fresh veggies and flowers are everywhere.  You can cut or pick your own of some of their products.  We've been waiting for the first cling-free peaches to come in. These are Sunbrights. 

It's hard to put peaches this fresh and sweet in a dough.  After just eating them fresh for a couple days, I decided to go to an old recipe from the turn of the century that we used to make in the 70's--Peach Melba.  If you make this, PLEASE try it with the peaches warm before you put them in the fridge to serve later.  (Or reheat the peaches in the microwave before serving.)  The warm peach contrasted with the chilled ice cream perfectly and made the raspberry sauce taste bright and fresh.

PEACH MELBA

Red Raspberry Sauce:

2 cups fresh red raspberries (Save a few fresh berries to put on top)

1/4 cup sugar

1 Tablespoon lemon juice

Process this mixture in a blender until pureed.  Pour into a fine-meshed strainer and press through to remove the seeds.  Cover the puree and refrigerate until needed.

Peaches:

3 large ripe peaches, peeled and split with seeds removed

2 cups sugar

2 cups water

To make the peaches easier to peel, you may immerse them in boiling water for about 30 seconds and then plunge into ice water to loosen the skin.

Bring the sugar and water to a boil and simmer about 5 minutes.  Add the clean peaches and boil gently about 7-8 minutes.  Remove from heat and allow to cool to a very warm temperature.

Vanilla Ice Cream:

Buy good quality vanilla ice cream or here's a good creamy version if you want to make your own.

Amaretti Cookies:

Crumble cookies to use as topping--one cookie per serving.

To put together the dessert, place one very warm peach in a dish.  Scoop vanilla ice cream over the peach.  Drizzle with fresh raspberry sauce and crumble an amaretti cookie on top.   Sprinkle with a couple fresh raspberries on top.

Rice Flour Blueberry Financiers

I love flour!  I read a post recently that displayed flour pouring out of a grain mill.  Wouldn't it be awesome to grind your own flour fresh when you're ready to bake some crusty loaf of whole-grain-to-die-for bread???--like grinding coffee beans fresh every morning for a pot of hot coffee???  Well I don't expect to go that far, but I do love the feel and smell of different flours.  Someone who knows that gets me a different kind of flour regularly and I have the fun and challenge of baking something from it.  This time it's rice flour.  One of my favorite sites gave me the inspiration for how to use my rice flour. Tartelette posted a recipe for Financiers with rice flour substituted for wheat flour.  I did a little research on Financiers and here's my version:

Financiers are usually made with wheat and almond flour.  Fruit in the center is optional.  I tried some of each and prefer the fruit added.  I found when substituting rice flour for the wheat, about 7/8 cup of rice flour = 1 cup wheat flour.  The almond flour is toasted and the butter is browned before beginning this recipe.

Toasted almond flour:

  Turn oven to 350 deg. F.  Spread almond flour over cookie sheet and toast in oven 6-8 minutes until lightly browned. 

Browned butter - beurre noisette:
  Put 1/2 cup of butter in a small pan over medium heat.  Bring it to a boil, swirling pan occasionally.  A foam will form on the butter.  Continue to cook it until the butter looks clear and the milk solids have dropped to the bottom of the pan and have turned deep brown.  Immediately remove from heat and pour through a cheesecloth-lined strainer.  Allow to cool.  Only 1/3 cup is needed for this recipe.  Use the rest to butter the pans.

Blueberry Financiers with Rice Flour

1/2 cup toasted almond flour

1/4 cup rice flour

3/4 cup vanilla confectioner's sugar (made by storing a vanilla bean in a jar of confectioner's sugar a couple weeks)  or plain confectioner's sugar and 1 tsp. pure vanilla extract

1/8 tsp. salt

4 large egg whites, lightly beaten

1/3 cup beurre noisette

Blueberry preserves

Preheat oven to 400 deg. F.  Place 12 Financier or tart molds on a cookie sheet and use a pastry brush to coat the inside of each one with some of the browned butter.  If you don't have those, you can use a mini-muffin pan. (I baked some using paper cupcake liners and some without--the ones without liners came right out of the molds nicely.  The paper was hard to remove from the others.)

In a large bowl whisk the flours, sugar and salt together.  Fold in the lightly-beaten egg whites and the 1/3 cup beurre noisette until well combined.  Scoop by spoonfuls into the molds.  Using the tip of a spoon place about a level teaspoon of blueberry preserves into the center of each little cake.  Bake 15 to 20 minutes until lightly browned and springy to the touch.  Remove from the molds and cool on a rack. 

These can be sprinkled lightly with confectioner's sugar when cool, but I love them just as they are with a pot of hot, sweet tea.

Corn, Beans and Avocado

I am learning to like cilantro.  I bought some for a dish and have quite a bit left over so I'm finding ways to use it.  Today I checked out the fridge and found several containers of cannellini beans that I had cooked from dried beans (I ran out of canned yesterday and had to raid my dry bean stash), I had 4 ears of leftover cooked corn and 2 avocados and 3 limes in a bowl on the counter.  My spice cabinet is always well-stocked so I knew I could do something here with my cilantro again.

I chopped up a head of romaine lettuce, added about a cup of my cannellini beans, cut the corn off two of the ears (they were small), cut up and added an avocado, sliced about 1/4 of an onion over it and sprinkled the salad with some chopped cilantro--about 3 Tblsp.  I tossed all that and sprinkled it with a dressing made of 2 Tblsp. olive oil, juice of 1/2 lime, 1/2 tsp. cumin, and salt and freshly-ground pepper to taste.  That made about 2 servings.  It was so easy, cool and good.  Perfect for a light summer meal on my breezy front porch.

BBA Challenge - Light Wheat Bread

I have fallen so far behind in my cooking, baking and blogging.  School is starting to wind down now, so I'm looking forward to getting back to it.  I've missed reading everyone else's posts also--got some catching up to do all around. 
We baked our Light Wheat Bread this weekend.  I actually prefer more rustic, crusty bread, but this is a really good sandwich bread for when a light sliced bread is in order.  It rose well and had good flavor.

Easter Eggs

As long as I can remember we colored Easter eggs. In Poland Easter was extremely important as a religious holiday.  It was the same when we were children.  We didn't receive colorful Easter baskets full of toys and candy and new Easter clothes.  We lined a plate with fresh moss, decorated it with spring flowers and set it out.  The next morning, when we came home from church, we found it full of colored eggs with perhaps one or two chocolate Easter candies.  Our home always had an Easter Lily and a poppy seed roll on the table. We kids spent the day between playing with our Easter eggs and eating them.  We made ramps and rolled our eggs to see whose egg was the fastest.  Before we ate them, we lined up our eggs, point to point and rammed them together to see whose egg was the strongest.  The egg that broke first was the one eaten.
Of course, we took turns hiding eggs and finding them.  Every clump of fresh grass or new daffodils had an egg hidden.  As we got older we became very creative in coloring them ourselves. 

One of our favorite ways of coloring eggs is to marble them using bowls of hot water, vinegar and food coloring (use the directions on the box of food dye) with a few teaspoons of salad oil added to the dye.

Every egg comes out different.  These were only dipped in two or three colors each and weren't left in very long.  The longer they stay in the dye, the more intense the colors become.  In the past we've had some look like galaxies in deep space with beautiful swirls of color against very dark backgrounds.  We've been making marbled eggs for many years and they always come out pretty and different.

We like to celebrate Easter with ham, traditional potato salad, sour cream cucumbers, and pickled beets with eggs:

This is a recipe from home also.  Mama heated equal parts vinegar, sugar and beet juice until the sugar dissolved.  If she didn't have quite enough beet juice, she added a little water.  Then she poured that mixture over sliced beets and peeled hard-boiled eggs and let them sit in the refrigerator a few days to allow the flavor to penetrate the beets and the egg whites.  They will keep in the refrigerator a long time.  We only added the eggs at Easter, but we had pickled beets often with our meals or as a snack with a chunk of homemade bread.

This year our Easter bread was actually an Irish Soda Bread.  It was made according to the directions on the bag and was delicious with our ham!  Thanks, again, C&K!