Peach Fritters

Workasaurus and Deadlineadactyl, while not slain have been beaten back with more than healthy doses of cunning, wit, guile, snarkasm and a good thwack or two from my rolling pin (if they were slain, then I'd have won the lottery or one of the equally wealthy but until now totally unknown Saatchi boys has fallen totally and utterly in love with me and has presented me with an engagement Aga (lilac, please) and we'd be off somewhere delicious and exotic with an excellent wireless connection).

My condo has smelled of peaches for the past week from the three-litre basket I picked up last week. Who needs those fizzy cans of air freshener or those plug-ins when you can just put out a bowl of fruit?

Soft, sweet and bursting with juices, a few were eaten straight out of hand. Ideally I'd have made a pie with them--they were so perfect--but piemaking wasn't in the cards: the temps have risen and since I do my crusts by hand, I'd probably worry the pastry into toughness. After flicking through a few pages, I found an idea so simple I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it before: fritters.

I founda recipe for Pasching Puffa (peach puffs/fritters) in the fat cakes section of our dear Edna's first cookbooks. My preference for cookbooks written by people who really cook and write for people who really cook goes without saying, but even I must smile when I read the heading "fat cakes." I'm not sure how many modern recipe writers, nor anyone on a plastic cooking show, could get away with naming something a "fat cake."

She explains, through the words of her friend Bevvy that fat cakes include doughnuts and fritters and anything else that's fried in deep fat. Personally, I think it could also be used to describe the way they poof into fatness as soon as the batter touches the searing hot oil.

The only adaptation I've made to the recipe is the addition of powdered ginger to the batter, and lowering the frying temp by about 10F--it originally called for 375F, but I found it too hot and the first few fritters browned a little too quickly, but what should have been soft cakey innards were still too wet.


Peach Fritters
(adapted from Edna Staebler's Pasching Puffa from Food That Really Scmecks p158)
Yields about 24

280g ap flour
1Tbsp baking powder
pinch salt
1tsp powdered ginger
250ml milk
1/2tsp vanilla
100g sugar
80g softened butter
2 eggs
1tsp powdered ginger
275-300g chopped peaches (fresh or canned)
1/2tsp lemon juice
fat for frying (lard, shortening, oil)

Seive together the flour, baking powder, salt and ginger; set aside.

Mix the vanilla into the milk; set aside.

Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Mix in the flour and milk mixtures, alternating, in the usual fashion (flour-milk-flour-milk-flour), scraping down the bowl every so often.

Fold in the chopped peaches and lemon juice.

Heat the oil to about 365F/185C. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls into hot fat; fry until golden. Drain on kitchen paper.

Dust with icing sugar, if desired. Serve slightly warmwith ice cream or dunked into maple syrup if you wish.


cheers!
jasmine

What I'm reading: Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

I'm a quill for hire!

Hagia is veddy veddy angry with me...

Hallo?

Anyone out there? Sigh...

Apologies for the week's silence. Wasn't planned. You see, I'd planned to upload the latest cookbook review last week, but the universe conspired against me.

Okay, not me personally, but said universe decided to play games with the weather in my part of the world. If you're here, you know that we had a very odd warm spell last week. Sure, it was nice, but when the elements change so drastically, it plays a number with my head. Three days of protomigraines. Glah.

For the lucky ones who tried to engage me in coversation, you know how loop(ed) I was on pain pills (my skin started tingling on Friday). Glah. Feeling a bit better now, but am tonnes behind in everything else I was supposed to do...work, housework, sorting through detritus...

No cooking or baking got done, lived on frozen leftovers, meals from my parents and things declared edible from the fastfoodrama mall.

And this is why my cat is veddy veddy angry with me.

I'd always known that we shared certain culinary preferences: Equal amounts of pleasure can be derrived from eating crunchy things as batting them around. Olives are divine. Beef in a can really isn't food. Ice cream is heaven. Sometimes only lemongrass will do.

Well...she's developed other tastes...for baked goods. Okay. I know of other cats who like breads ... and that's okay (I think)...but she never wanted anything to do with cookies or cakes or pie crust. She's developed a particular prediliction for raw flour. I've caught her licking speckles off the phone and the floor and my hands.

So when I brought home a container of Timbits (doughnut holes to non-Canadians), she tried every trick in the book to get one. She sat by my feet and gazed up at me. She pawed at me. she even hopped onto the couch and snuggled up next to me. When her kittenly wiles proved useless, she basically stuck her head on my saucer and tried to liberate a baked ball of doughnutty goodness.

Umm....no.

Then she heard the words she rarely hears from me: "Naughty girl! Down NOW."

She knows what those words mean...she's been caught doing something she's not supposed to do...but instead of running away and hiding behind the couch, she stood at the far end of the room and just glared at me.

You know the look...I'm sure those of you with petulant children have received it: the you are being so unfair to me. I'm a good little one and I deserve a... look.

I got that look ALL EVENING.

Truth be told, I don't know what baked goods will do to cats...but I don't want her begging for food, nor do I want her to further develop her taste for people food. Given she's not a begging cat, I don't know what's gotten into her.

Maybe she's just peeved at me that I've been so busy...or hiding in dark rooms with a glass of water and a few pills. Maybe this was how I was supposed to make up with her: by giving her Timbits...preferably my favourite cherry ones...

Well...she's not going to be happy with me over the next few days as I try and get caught up with things...and formulate that next post. Oh well...'tis the life of a cat.

cheers!
jasmine

Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side

Okay, now that I've let you have that Musical Youth moment...

...or two...

Since my Time to make the doughnuts post one of Tim Horton's CSRs wrote back with a little info on their Dutchies. No, they don't know why they're called that, but these doughnuts were part of the original Tim Horton offering in in 1964. Fair enough. Baking Soda came up with a very plausible suggestion, when she suggested that the name may have something to do with the Pennsylvania Dutch -- makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, my little cakes kinda sorta got all squooshed on their way from the second rise to the oil. I'd forgotten to put some flour on the first tray and when I lifted them out they went from little square cushion about to be tansformed into yummy fried treats to what looked to be pummeled remnants of a pillow fight about to be transformed into yummy fried treats.

Watching the bits of dough bob and float in the hot oil, I must admit that I began doughnut-watching. It's like cloud-watching, finding familiar figures in gathered bits of water mist against a blue canvas, but it's tastier. Think of it as a foodie version of a Rorschach Inkblot Test.

Not sure what you see, but here's what I found:



Left: A hen sitting on her nest, but the photo makes it look more like an alley cat that's been in one too many fights.
Right: A sock puppet.


Left: Astroboy
Right: A heart.




Left: Frankenstein's monster wearing a beret.
Right: Either an ice cream cone or a turkey leg.

Hmmm...notice how I see a lot of food images in food? Wonder what that says about me.

Anyway...so there I was with this collection of doughnuts. Granted a few were eaten that first night, but after a couple of days, they just get a little...well...stale. Not one to let a good doughnut go to waste, I did the only thing I cold think of...

Make a doughnut pudding.



It's quite simple. Instead of using bread or jam sandwiches for bread pudding, simply cut up the stale doughnuts, and let them soak in a sweet, creamy-eggy mixture for a little bit before baking in a 180C (350F) oven until the custard has set. Yummy, yummy yummy.


cheers!
jasmine

Time to make the doughnuts: Dutchies

When I deduced that Tartelette and Peabody devised a divine doughnutty doo declared "Time to make the doughnuts" I knew I'd be getting out the big vat-o-oil for this one.

With so many flavours and types out there, narrowing down my entry was pretty easy: the Dutchie.

"Dutchie?" I hear some of you say. "What on Earth are you talking about?" (Okay, others are saying, "Oh man, couldn't you do something good?" while others are leaping about for joy (yeah, I hear the little thuddy sounds)).

To me, the Dutchie is the quintessential Canadian doughnut. And trust me, Canadians know doughnuts. According to this CBC article, there are more doughnut shops per capita here than anywhere else on our big blue marble, and we eat more doughnuts than anyone else in the world (that and, apparently, KD).

Available at pretty much every Tim Hortons (but the one in my office), these sultana-studded pillows of sugary-glazed, yeast-risen goodness seem to have as many fans as detractors...is it the coffee shop's embodiment of our two solitudes? Peut-être...but it has nothing to do with our national soul-searching, culture-defining, language-determining passtime...In my opinion, it has everything to do with freshness.

Enter any hockey area at 6am (or earlier) and you'll see a gaggle of parents, clutching their double-doubles, munching away on Dutchies watching their kids practice. Walk into a Timmy's and you'll see a number of women conversing and cajolling over coffee and their Dutchies. Head off to the office and you'll see the guys gravitate to the still-warm deep fried squares of dough-covered raisins. These, I think, are those in the pro-Dutchie contingent. People who happen to get their treats freshly made, retaining a bit of oven warmth.

The anti-Dutchie group seem to centre on two issues. The first is raisins: people either like them or they don't (not sure if I've ever met anyone who's indifferent to the wrinkled beasts). So, if you don't like raisins, you probably won't like Dutchies. The other point is their peculiar ability to go stale faster than any other of Tim's doughnutty offerings (ring, twists, fritters or Timbits); unless you see someone put them on display racks or if they still have their "just made" tag, chances are the glaze has dried and begun to flake off and the doughnut itself may be better used as the puck at those 6am practices.

Why are they called Dutchies? I don't know--and Tim's won't tell me. I sent them a very polite email asking for non-nutrient info on these treats, which they've promptly ignored. (Edit: They've since replied.) My theory is they are based on the Dutch oliebollen...but who really wants to eat something that sounds vaguely like "oily ball" so in true pocket-riffling, while wearing rubber gloves style, these fried cakes were monickered "Dutchies." (If someone really knows why they are called Dutchies, please let me know and I'll amend this post...or post your theory...and no "they were originally made from Dutch people" is not an acceptable response, sorry JDN.)

Unlike most doughnuts, Dutchies aren't ring doughnuts or twists--they are squares or rectangles, made from a yeast-risen dough, sprinkled with raisins. I want to say the Dutchies of my childhood were glazed in honey, but now seem to be glazed in a simple syrup. If anything, they are reminicent of a blueberry fritter-sans blueberries. Most I've seen are uncomfortably large and more filling than I'd like. If I have one, I usually split it into two or three and save the rest for later. Microwaving helps diminish the staleness a bit.

I searched for an appropriate recipe to try, but I couldn't find one. I looked at several oliebollen, olykoek and beignet recipes in attempts to figure out my own variant, but in the end, I decided to base the recipe on my dear friend Edna Staebler's Kucha recipe from Food That Really Schmecks.

In her fat cakes section, she recommened using plain kucha dough for yeast doughnuts (you can simply roll the dough out and form it into little buns and bake them at about 180-200C (350-400F) until done). Edna's never steered me wrong, so I followed her advice and used the plain kucha as the base, adding the sultanas, spicing and honey-water glazing to transform them into Dutchies.

Dutchies
adapted from Edna Staebler's Kucha from Food That Really Schmecks

yield approx. 15

250ml hand-hot milk
3tsp yeast
55g butter, very soft
60g sugar
1tsp salt
grated zest of one small lemon
1 egg, well beaten
420g plain flour (you may need less)
1/2tsp ground cinnamon
1/4tsp ground nutmeg
100g sultanas, soaked in boiling water with about 1/4tsp bicarbonate of soda
honey-water of whatever strength you prefer

Sprinkle the yeast into the warm milk, then add the butter, sugar, salt and zest and stir well. Add the egg and spices. Stir in enough flour so the dough holds together, but is still tacky. Be careful to not add so much flour that the dough is stiff-- if after you've added all the flour the dough still seems too loose and tacky, bundle it up and let it firm in the fridge for about 20 minutes. Take out your frustrations on the dough for about 15 minutes before letting it double in size in a warm place--anywhere from one to two hours.

After the dough has risen, punch it down and add the drained sultanas and knead again to distribute the fruit. Roll out to 1cm thickness and cut to 5cm squares. Place the squares on a lightly floured surface and let them rise again, until they've doubled in size.

Fry in hot oil until golden and blot on paper towels, then glaze with honey-water.

cheers!
jasmine

Edit: Kucha clarifcation

Related Post: Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side