Peach Muffins: A Snapshot of Excess

"Nature's candy in my hand or can or a pie
Millions of peaches, peaches for me
Millions of peaches, peaches for free"

Peaches, by The Presidents of the United States of America

Peaches slipped from our hands into an overflowing half bushel box at The Homestead Farm and it didn't really feel like millions of peaches. The air was surprisingly humidity free, the sky was clear, as we walked through yellow and white peach orchards with a couple friends of ours talking about local food and less noble things, and eating and picking peaches. But come this morning, when faced with dozens and dozens of peaches (not to mention the many pounds of blackberries we picked, and the 8 pounds of tomatoes, 5 pounds of zucchini, 4 pounds of cucumbers, and assorted other produce from our CSA) it sure felt like millions of peaches.

I wasn't quite sure of my plan of attack, having some vague idea that peaches could be frozen and I could bake with some and we would certainly just eat some of them. There are directions for freezing peaches online and it is surprisingly easy. Still, after hours of boiling, skinning, chopping, coating in lemon juice, and mixing with syrup it didn't feel so easy. And my kitchen was covered with peach bits and skins and juice, like a peach volcano had exploded from the sink.

After getting a few pounds of tomatoes, blackberries, and half a bushel of peaches in the freezer, I still had 20 or so peaches staring at me. And while it was satisfying to see the produce in the freezer and dream of the cold winter day when we will have a taste of summer on our plates, it was impossible for me to leave the kitchen without having made something to eat. Enter super simple peach muffins from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.

Peach Muffins
These muffins are from the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, and are a variation on the basic muffin recipe. The recipe calls for pastry flour, but I substituted whole wheat pastry flour (also called graham flour) since that is what I had on hand. Instead of melted butter, I used canola oil and used soymilk instead of milk. I am the substitution queen and while that may sound like cheating since I am not following the original recipe, I believe it is in the spirit of early cooks who were more likely to use what was on hand than chasing down ingredients. The range of recommended sugar depends on what you are adding to it; I used about 1/4 cup of sugar with good results.

2 cups pastry flour
3 tsps baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbs to 1/2 cup sugar
1 cup milk
4 Tbs melted butter
1 egg
1 cup peeled and chopped peaches

Preheat oven to 400. Grease muffin tin (12 regular or 24 small). Mix and sift dry ingredients together. Beat together milk, butter, and egg. Mix wet ingredients into dry until just moist. Gently mix in peaches. Bake 15 to 20 minutes.

Worth the Wait: Easy Rhubarb Pie with Flaky Crust

Yes, it has been about two months since I posted anything and, wow, time flies. There are a few reasons for this but I don't know that it really matters. What is more important is that I am back to cooking, back to searching old cookbooks for recipes cooked by our grandmothers and great-grandmothers (let's face it, it probably wasn't our grandfathers doing the cooking).

We start with an ingredient that is in season right now in many parts of the country. But this rhubarb isn't just any rhubarb it is fresh from my aunt's backyard, picked while we were visiting family in Wisconsin. Yeah, folks, Wisconsin isn't just brats and cheese though we had our fill of those, too. (I digress: we attended the World's Largest Brat Fest in Madison and to my delight they had Boca Brats!). My husband spotted it from across the yard and said, over his shoulder as he started running towards it, "Is that rhubarb?" Sure enough, there was a giant ripe for the pickin' rhubarb plant in the corner of the yard. He hacked off a number of stalks, wrapped it in foil, and placed it in a cooler for the 16 hour drive back home. He planned to make his not quite famous rhubarb bread, but I got to it first.

If you aren't familiar with rhubarb, there is something you really ought to know about it: this stuff is tart. When I mention cooking rhubarb to people it is almost inevitably followed by, "Yeah, you have to mix it with strawberries and lots of sugar." It seems our ancestors weren't so quick to get rid of the tartness as most recipes I found did not mix rhubarb with any sweet fruit, though they do call for sugar. I figured, in this day of super sour candy we can surely handle a little tart fresh rhubarb, right?

This pie is actually made from two different recipes, one for the crust from the Rumford Complete Cookbook and one for the filling from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. The crust is flaky and tasty, though in my impatience I didn't roll it thin enough. The filling is tart and sturdy, with only four ingredients. This pie comes together really quickly and the results are pretty darn good. My husband thought is was good, too, but shook his head and said, "It's no Mennonite pie." He was right, of course, but I think he wasn't thinking of just the pie but of our day spent lollygagging around the Dane County Farmers Market, sitting on the grass eating bread, cheese curds, and rhubarb pie. It really doesn't get better than that.

Rhubarb Pie
The crust recipe is from the Rumford Complete Cookbook, Revised, 1940, and the filling is from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1948. The crust calls for "1 1/3 cups lard, or other shortening." Instead of lard, I used 1 cup of Spectrum organic trans fat free shortening and 1/3 cup butter. Also, because my husband loved the Mennonite pie with the crumbled topping so much, and because I was too lazy to roll out more dough to make a lattice pattern on top, I mixed a little bit of the pastry crust with a little bit of sugar and crumbled it over the top. The filling recipes notes "many prefer to scald rhubarb before using," so I scalded about half of it and the rest I left raw. This made the filling a little less tart, and also seemed to be a nice mix of very soft, gel-like pieces of rhubarb and firmer pieces.

Flaky Pastry
3 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 1/3 cups shortening, see note above
ice-cold water

Sift the flour and salt together into a bowl. Blend the shortening into the flour with a pastry cutter or two knives until well mixed (shortening will be pea size or smaller). Add water, about a tablespoon at a time, to form a dough, cutting the pastry the whole time.

Roll dough onto a floured board. Roll only lengthwise. Fold dough evenly into three layers (lengthwise, like a trifolded piece of paper). Turn it half around and repeat. Do this at least three times to make the pastry flaky. If possible, chill the pastry before baking.

Rhubarb Filling
1 1/2 cups rhubarb, chopped in 1/2 pieces before measuring
7/8 cup sugar
1 egg
2 Tbs flour

Heat oven to 375. Scald rhubarb if desired (see note above). Mix sugar, flour, and egg into rhubarb. Pile high in the middle of the prepared crust, and cover with a top layer of pastry, latticed pastry, or crumbles (see note above). Bake for about 50 minutes.

When the Sun's Comin' Up, Got Cakes on the Griddle...

2008 is going to be a good year, or at least one filled with new classic recipes. My family and friends were kind to me this Christmas, giving me many classic cookbooks and you are going to be introduced to a lot of new ones in the coming days and weeks. But we'll start with a classic recipe for griddle cakes from a truly classic cookbook, Three Meals a Day: Cooking, Table, Toilet, Health. As the title suggests, this book is more than just recipes. If you're like my husband you'll ask the whole car ride home, "TOILET?! What does that have to do with cooking? TOILET!?" But you're not like my husband, so I trust you'll just enjoy this recipe and look forward to reading excerpts from it in the future.

This copy of Three Meals was given to me by a friend (she's my husband's boss, too, so shouldn't we be the ones giving her super cool gifts?). She collects classic Spanish and French primers and travel books, but for some reason picked this book up years ago. She wrote a very kind note about the book and how she never quite understood why she bought it. I'm glad she held onto it, because it is an amazing gift an an amazing book.

I always thought griddle cakes were the same thing as pancakes, but these definitely aren't the pancakes I know. The recipe says they are light and fluffy but, well, they aren't. They are rather heavy, but they do puff up quite a bit. You can see from the list of ingredients that there aren't any eggs or sweetener, and the only fat is from the buttermilk, but the corn meal provides a certain amount of sweetness and different texture. I just put a little maple syrup on mine, as you can see in the picture above, but my husband topped his with peanut butter and apple butter and a little syrup, he was shocked, shocked I tell you, that after eating six (!!) of these that he felt full most of the day. The cakes are large enough that you can cut them in half and toast them like an English muffin. Yum.

Griddle Cakes
Adapted from Three Meals a Day: Cooking, Table, Toilet, Health, sometime in the 1890's. I cut the recipe in half and it made about 12 good size cakes. The batter is really, really thick, so you can add more water and they will be more pancake like, bubbling up when they are done on one side. The thick batter can be scooped onto the griddle using an ice cream scoop and cooked at a lower temperature for a little longer. I used half whole wheat flour, and half white flour and the balance seemed about right; all white flour would probably make a lighter cake.

1 quart of buttermilk
1 tsp salt
1 Tbs baking soda
1 cup corn meal
5 cups flour

Beat all ingredients together, until most of the lumps are gone. Preheat a griddle over medium heat. Pour about 1/2 cup of batter onto the griddle and cook on one side for a couple minutes. After flipping the cake, press down slightly with the spatula. Cook until done.

Brunch-alicious

Having friends over for brunch is one of my favorite ways to entertain. I don't feel pressured to make fancy food and I don't fall asleep during the party. And if brunch is followed by a rocking game of Guitar Hero III, well, even better! In case you're wondering, I ROCK!

Ahem. Back to brunch food.

I like to keep it simple, so we had pretty standard fare: eggs baked with gruyere and onion fresh chives from our CSA, fried green tomatoes also from our CSA, upside down cranberry ginger cake made using this recipe, biscuits, cooked apples, and what we affectionately call "half-eaten" banana bread (a lovely chocolate-chip banana bread that our guests brought and apologized for taste-testing--who can blame them?).

Two recipes are classics: cooked apples from Slenderella and biscuits from Kitchen Tested Recipes. The apple recipe was simple and just okay, so I won't bore you with the details. But I am providing the biscuit recipe below because they're worth making. I made no ingredient substitutions in this recipe but because I don't have a stand mixer (someday, someday) I just beat everything by hand and it turned out just fine. As a matter of fact, I imagine the only reason this includes mixer instructions is because it's in a Mixmaster cookbook because I've always read that one should be careful not to overmix biscuits.

Baking Powder Biscuits
Adapted from Kitchen Tested Recipes: By the Home Economists of the Famous Sunbeam Mixmaster, 1933. The one reason I hesitated to post this is because it calls for 4 teaspoons of baking powder. If you use the standard stuff you buy in the grocery store the flavor might be off because you will taste the aluminum in it. I highly recommend for your tastebuds and your health that you buy non-aluminum baking powder like this one. I'm placing my preparing-for-holiday-baking order with King Arthur soon so if you know me in real life and want me to order some for you, I will.

I think you could use butter instead of shortening, or try a shortening without trans-fats like this one.

Also, I suggest sifting the flour before measuring. I prefer recipes that list ingredients by weight but since most of them don't I've found that sifting, or at least stirring the flour and lightly scooping it into the measuring cup, is more likely to get you the right amount of flour.

2 cups flour (sift before measuring)
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
4 Tbs shortening
3/4 cup milk

Preheat oven to 450. Place flour, baking powder, and salt in large mixing bowl. Mix on low for one minute or whisk together. Cut shortening to small pieces, then mix on medium for 3 minutes (or blend by hand with a pastry blender). Add 1/2 of the milk, working only enough to combine the ingredients. Add the rest of the milk and mix.

Turn out on a floured board, pat or roll about 3/4 inch thick, and cut with biscuit cutter.

Bake for 15 minutes at 450.

Christmas in a Bowl

Now normally I'm not one to rush into Christmas and I cringe when I walk into stores and see Christmas stuff now. But, come on, it can't hurt to be reminded of sitting around on cold nights stringing popcorn and cranberries for the tree, can it? I remember my parents popping loads of popcorn and leaving it in brown paper bags to go stale so they could string it. My husband and I did this for a couple years and hung it out for the birds after Christmas was over, but, dang, it was a lot of work.

You may not be able to find this recipe in any classic cook book but what's more classic than popcorn? Ok, maybe popcorn with dried cranberries, covered with soymilk and eaten for breakfast isn't something grandma ate but stick with me for a minute. This is good stuff. Alton Brown said you can eat popcorn with milk and that's good enough for me. (I can't find a link to this recommendation but I'm sure I saw on it one of this shows. I wouldn't lie to you.)

Now don't go using microwave popcorn from one of those illness causing bags. Stick to an air popper or a pot on the stove or a brown paper bag or, my favorite, a microwave popcorn bowl. I made it without oil or butter or salt, but I think fat and salt wouldn't hurt this breakfast. Pour a handful into a bowl, top with a few dried cranberries, and pour on soymilk or milk or whatever you like on your cereal. Yum.