The contraption: slow cooked vanilla poached peaches

After a summer off from my slow cooker to contemplate the contraption I'm back, determined to see this blogging project through to the end.

Every attempted recipe has been meat-focussed...and maybe that's the problem. Apart from pulled pork and ribs, nothing it's done has made me cotton to it, and only leaves me to wonder why so many people are enamoured with the beast and its kin.

With this in mind, this month I decided to eschew the contraption's carnal side to experiment with the sweeter side of its personality.

Poached fruits was the obvious first step for me--whole specimens left to blurble in a sweet syrup shouldn't push the machine far beyond its capabilities.

By the time I mustered up the energy to pull it off the shelf and prepare this month's offering, local peaches had their day and all I could easily find were sad, softball-like imports. The only positive comment I can say about these truck-driven specimens is they retained some semblance of fragrance.

It doesn't take a genius to poach fruit. Whip up a poaching liquid, spiced as you wish, and then let the prepared fruit simmer away until it's reached to the point of doneness. Again, I'm not convinced that using a slow cooker helped in any way, and in fact just gave me an extra couple of pieces to wash (the cooker insert and lid).

Normally when I poach fruit, I use water or juice but this time I decided to use a vidal from Norfolk County's Florence Estate Winery. By the time the fruit was done, the seed-speckled liquid was heady with peach and vanilla and retained a bit of the wine's crispness.

Poached fruit is wonderful on a cool night, especially now as the seasons turn. Will I do this again? Definitely, but I'll save myself dish rack space and leave the slow cooker out of it.

Vanilla Poached Peaches
Serves eight

8 ripe but firm peaches, halved and stoned (skinning, optional)
250ml (1c) sweet white wine
250ml (1c) water
80ml (0.33c) honey
1 vanilla pod, slit in half lengthways OR 1dspn (2tsp) vanilla paste

pouring custard, whipped cream, heavy cream or ice cream, for serving (optional)

Preheat slow cooker, if its manufacturer's instructions dictate.

Heat wine, water, honey and vanilla until bubbling.

Arrange peaches in slow cooker, pour vanilla syrup overtop. Cover and cook on low for 90 minutes. The fruit should be firm, but yield to an inserted blade.

Remove peaches from cooker and pour syrup into pan. Over a medium-high flame, reduce liquid by about half.

Serve warm: two halves per person with syrup dizzled over top. serve with custard, cream or ice cream, if you wish.

cheers!
jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!

Peach-almond upside down cake

I’m not the only one who hates being photographed.

I can’t really point to a reason for this neurosis: There’s the once-natural smile, held too long; being at the mercy of a once-enthusiastic and creative soul reduced to crutches of standard poses against unimaginative backdrops; the once-hidden moment that is now forever captured. At some level, it’s the blunted truth captured by a mechanical eye. I am the subject which becomes the object.

I also have a pathological distrust of photographers and a deep-seated dread of cameras: photographers are evil and cameras are the work of a malevolent being.

In other words, I simply don’t photograph well.

In many pictures I look like an Ewok with thyroid issues as drawn by James Gillray. Other times I look like a maniacal motivational speaker who specialises in presenting to sadistic dentists and their overly Botoxed, gold-lamé sandal wearing assistants who own their own tanning beds.

That ain't pretty. Not that I do pretty.

My recent need for a head shot was met my usual apoplexy: knotted stomach, quickened breath and more than a touch of “just let me do a line drawing likeness of myself and be done with it.”

After meeting Jay, I could see why my best friend recommended him. He captured gorgeous, light-filled natural images that radiated her personality. His online portfolio drew me in with snaps of spirited moments, thoughtful compositions and unrehearsed expression. Our pre-shoot meeting confirmed my initial impressions of him formed from those images: approachable, perceptive and receptive.

Truth be told I think he got more than he reckoned…Others would have stared blankly or nonchalantly (or not so nonchalantly) looked for the exit as my tongue unfurled non-profane bluntness and free-wheeling adjectives and adverbs. Him? He rolled his eyes several times with an impish grin and, unlike others, he very deftly handled my pronouncements, concerns and meandering tales while reassuring me and talking through the nuts and bolts of the photo shoot—duration, colours and apart from lippy, no make up.

The session itself was very unlike other photo sessions I’ve done. Those were mechanical and processed. This was like spending the afternoon with an old friend…except, of course, for the honkin' huge camera, massive light reflector and the occasional crowd that gathered to see what was so special about this short chick in pink that she had an incredibly tall stalker photographing her every step.

The shutter clicked more than 200 times, but it didn’t feel like it.

There were more than two dozen useable images. Heck, there were more than dozen good images. From those, these two were chosen, each imparting a different facet of my personality:



According to my friend Gin, I can no longer claim to not photograph well.

Begrudgingly...I think she’s right.

Quite honestly, I think Jay is the reason there were so many good images. It goes beyond the facts that he has a good eye, understands light, composition and movement. It’s because he made me feel comfortable and forget that I was being stalked by an incredibly tall man with a soul-stealing camera.

Good gravy. That’s a revelation on par with Herschel’s discovery of Uranus.

Seriously. It’s THAT big.

And it must be noted.

What appeared from my kitchen was this peach upside down cake, inspired by Ontario’s August peaches. I gave it to him when I selected the images. It wasn't a total surprise as I emailed quesitons about allergies and preferences. But he and his family appreciated this small bit of thanks, asking for the recipe. And that, to me, is all I could ask for.

This cake is the progeny of several different recipes (but my main inspirations were recipes by Rose Murray, as blogged by Charmian, and Canadian Living). It’s deceptive in that it looks as if it should be treacly, but it’s not. The caramel is light and tamed by a pinch of salt; it melts with the peach juices into the cakes soft crumb. If you’re in midwinter and can’t get in-season fruit, drained, canned peaches work just as well and is a delicious way of bringing back summer in the midst of dark and cold days.


Peach-Almond Upside Down Cake
Yield: one 20cm/8" cake

For the topping:
100g (0.5c) brown sugar
45g (3Tbsp) butter, melted
pinch salt
4-5 peaches, peeled, sliced into 0.5cm wedges

For the cake
90g (6.5Tbsp) butter
2dspn (1.5Tbsp) flavourless oil
120g (0.66c) sugar
1 egg
1tsp almond extract
1tsp, rounded baking powder
0.75tsp bicarbonate of soda
130g (1c) cake flour
0.25tsp salt
125ml (0.5c) milk/cream
125ml (0.5c) vanilla yoghurt
Garnish (optional)
A handful of toasted almond flakes

Preheat oven to 170C/350F. Butter a 20cm/8" springform pan and line the bottom with a round of parchment. Wrap the tin's outside in tin foil to keep the caramel from leaking (and burning) in your oven. Line a baking sheet with tin foil as well. Set aside.
Sift together the baking powder, bicarb, flour and a quarter teaspoon of salt and set aside. Mix together the milk and yoghurt; set that aside too.

Melt brown sugar, 45g butter and a pinch of salt until bubbly. Pour into the prepared pan. Place the peach slices in the caramel in whatever configuration you wish. Set the tin on the lined baking sheet and set aside.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the oil. Add the eggs one at time, beating well between each addition. Pour in the almond extract and mix again. Scrape down the bowl's sides with a rubber spatula.

Add the flour mixture and yoghurty milk mixture in the usual alternating way: flour-milk-flour-milk-flour--scraping down the sides between additions. Give the mixture a gentle turn with the spatula before turning the batter into the prepared, carameled and peached pan. Evenly spread the batter before popping it into the preheated oven. Depending upon your kitchen's temperament, bake for 45-60 minutes. When done, an inserted skewer will come out clean-ish, with a few crumbs adhering to the stick, the cake will spring back to the touch and pull away from tin's sides. It will be a golden tawny colour.

Let cool for at least an hour before unclipping the sides. Invert onto a cake plate, so the peachy bottom is on top. It's easiest to remove the parchment round while the cake is still warm, to preserve the loveliness of the peach pattern.

Strew with toasted almonds and serve the cake warm with or without ice cream or whipped cream.

cheers!
jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!

Peach-cranberry upside down cake

The dregs of winter.

Neither cold nor warm. More wet than dry. Icy when I leave for work, muddy when I return.

Lazy winter weekends where I clatter pans, meander through books and generally potter about the house no longer satisfy.

I fantasize about plantings for my wee front garden—in my mind it is the Hanging Gardens of Babylon of the north, but in reality it is a plot not quite as wide as I am tall, and about the length of my car, recessed into shade and the home to a colony of miner bees.

My mind fidgets like a Chihuahua on amphetamines. One moment I’m sketching out a book, and then I’m sketching a bowl of fruit. I research yoga and Pilates classes then wonder if I can attend the next presentation in the international governance lecture series.

Winter vegetables and the hearty stews no longer hold my attention and lighter fare leaves me wanting. I fixate on flavours that won’t be palatable for months. I want sweet and yielding fruit, but all I can find are bland rock-hard fruits with more customs stamps than my last three passports combined.

Travelled peaches don’t satisfy, with their bred for travelling distance crunchy flesh. I like leaners—syrupy juices that dribble down my chin, leaving me needing to change my T-shirt. I pick up a peach at the mediumscarymegamart and sniff it. I can’t tell if it’s a fruit or a softball.

That said, my dregs of winter craving is for peaches. Preserved peaches would do, but neither My Dear Little Cardamummy nor I put any up this summer. I’m not considering shop-bought canned peaches. So I’m left sniffing fuzzy softballs, hoping for a sign they retain some hope of the fruit they are desperately trying to convince me.

I don’t know how many peaches I sniffed to find four almost passable specimens. Passable, but not exemplary. If they were eating peaches, I’d be more disheartened than I am. But four peaches aren’t enough for more than a couple of servings of my favourite honey-roasted peach dessert: roasting masques their off-seasonness, and brings out their fruity tastes and scents.

An upside down cake was my solution. The peaches, sliced and prettily layered at the bottom of a cake pan, would have their natural fruitiness revived with the help of a toffee sauce. Strewn with cranberries, any residual sourness would be excused.

I was very happy with the resulting dessert. Unmolded from its springform (although it can be made with a regular round baking tin), the peaches were golden, with warm toffee oozing to the cake plate below. Thanks to lemoned buttermilk, the cake was tangy and tender; its snowy crumb incredibly light.

It may not be summer yet, but with this cake, I’m not too bothered about it.

Peach Cranberry Upside Down Cake
1 20cm (8”) cake

3 peaches, sliced into 1cm (0.5") wedges
a handful or two of dried cranberries
100g (0.5c) sugar
grated rind and juice of half a lemon
150ml (0.66c) buttermilk
0.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
95g (7 Tbsp) butter, divided
75g (0.3c) brown sugar
salt
145g (1c + 4tsp) cake flour
1tsp baking powder
70g (5 Tbsp) butter
1 egg

Preheat oven to 170F/350F.

Butter an 8” (20cm) round springform cake tin and place a parchment round on the bottom. Layer the peach wedges on the parchment and scatter the dried cranberries over top, letting them settle into whichever nooks and crannies they find.

Rub the lemon rind into the sugar and set aside.

Mix the buttermilk, lemon juice and bicarb together. It will fizz as you get put together the rest of the cake.

Sift flour, baking powder and a pinch of salt together. And again, set that aside.

Make a toffee by melting 25g (2 Tbsp) butter with the brown sugar and a pinch of salt in a heavy-bottomed pan, until it is smooth and liquid. Pour over the layered fruit.

Cream the remaining 70g (5 Tbsp) butter with the lemon-infused sugar, until light. Beat in the egg. Lightly mix in the flour and buttermilk in the usual alternating fashion (dry-wet-dry-wet-dry). Pour over the prepared fruit.

Bake for 35-45 minutes or until the sides pull away from the pan and an inserted skewer comes out clean.

Note: Obviously, the number of peaches you'll need is entirely dependent upon the size of peaches you have. I used three for this recipe, but you may need more or fewer.


cheers!
jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!

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!

Sweet, spicy and just a little tart...y

Gosh...that title could be a bit of a self-descriptor, couldn't it?

Well, maybe not tarty...

How about "cognisant of her gods-given feminine attributes and will occasionally dress the part?"

Hmmm...tarty scans better...especially after some of the bordering-on-lascivious glances I got today. Lascivious in both senses: certain women disapproved of a particular blouse while certain men appreciated today's wardrobe choice.

Every once in a while it's good to do things like that. Stress on "once in a while" -- I'm sure if I dressed like that every day I'd either get a talking to about distracting the boys from their work while making the more body conscious slim-everythinged girls painfully aware that a thin middle isn't part of the universal definition of attractiveness, the lack of "professionalism" or "genuine concern" that I've gone off the deep end and am going through some sort of crisis/depression or have been taken over by the spirit of Cher.

So...why do I do it? I'm not sure I have a good reason--or any reason really. Do I need one?

Maybe part of the reason lies within a search for balance (or rebalance). I think I live a rather quiet life--I don't fly jets, swing from trapeezes or work for CSIS (even though I did consider applying)--so every once in a while I do something that brings out a different side to the usual Jasmine that most people have come to expect: take off (by myself) to a different country where I don't speak the language, be nearly deafened at a rock concert or wear something that's technically within the office dress code but would probably more appropriate at a bar, a concert or in a different country where I don't speak the language.

I guess the same can be said for cooking. Take a sweet, juicy and luscious tree-ripened fruit, and turn up the heat and add spices and a couple of hits of acid until you get a nice balance of sweet, tart, salt and sour. It's still recognisable as derrived from that original fruit, but it's got an injection of attitude that lets it play nicely with meats or a good wodge of cheese.

Yup...it's peach chutney. Thick and chunky, sweet and savoury with a gorgeous golden colour that will lift your spirits even in the dead of winter.

If you've never made chutney before, this is a really easy recipe and one you can do in an afternoon (as opposed to prep the night before). Even though it's okay to eat immediately, let it sit for about a month before spooning it out.



Lascivious peach chutney
makes approximately two litres

1.75 kg peeled, diced fresh peaches
2 tbsp pickling salt
675g sugar
375ml apple cider vinegar
2 dspn minced garlic
175g diced cooking onion
1 dspn powdered ginger
2 minced fresh red chillis (or to taste)
180ml lime juice
175g raisins
50g minced ginger, boiled in a simple syrup for about 15 minutes and then drained
20g plain flour
1 dspn dry mustard
1/4 tsp turmeric

Salt the peaches and let stand for about an hour (or longer, if you wish).

Simmer the sugar, vinegar, garlic, onion, ginger powder, chillis, lime juice and raisins. Drain the peaches (reserve the juice--you'll see why in the next post) and add to the pot. Bring the entire mixture to a good, ploppy boil.

Lower the flame and let simmer for about 30-40 minutes until soft and it begins to thicken, stirring occasionally. Add the boiled ginger and cook for another 10 minutes, stirring often.

Mix together the flour, mustard and turmeric. Take the pot off the hob and add the flour mixture to the chutney in several additions, stirring well between each spoonful. Return to the heat and stir for another five minutes until it reaches the thickness you want.

Ladle into hot, sterilized jars and store in a cool, dark place. I don't return the jars to the canner afterwards--I just wait for the lids to snap. If you get bottles that don't seal properly, then put the bottles into the fridge and finish those first.


Cheers!
j