It is Peach Season!
Peaches always ripen here the first few weeks in May. The original peach tree died a few years ago, but we quickly replanted another. This year the fruit is abundant and delicious even though the tree is rather small. Picking is a daily obligation as one day a peach is hard and the next day, I am fighting the birds for it.
We call these our “bend over and eat peaches”. They are so juicy and so sweet. Many a shirt has been ruined with peach juice. And these peaches have FUZZ! Why don’t store-bought peaches have fuzz?
We have two peach trees. Depending on the size of the crop, there are many peach recipes that are favorites at our home.
This year the first dessert we made is peach crisp. I use the recipe from one of my favorite cook books. If you are not familiar with Susan Branch, she is an author, watercolorist and designer. Though born in Southern California, she lives in an 1849 home in Martha’s Vineyard.
Her cookbooks are works of art with handwritten copy. One of my favorites is The Summer Cookbook. The peach crisp recipe is based on the Peach & Plum Crisp one in this book. You can tell I use this recipe a lot as the page is a bit dog-eared! I believe this book may be out of print, but Amazon has it here.
You can’t go wrong with anything crisp~~apple, peach, pear, and cherry. I use this recipe for all fruits because the “crisp” part is the perfect topping. I adjust the recipe by increasing the quantity of one fruit vs. two. Click here for the recipe.
What is interesting about picking fresh fruit, is that it doesn’t last very long. So I need to use the fruit within a few days. As a result, yesterday we made peach salsa.
I didn’t really follow a recipe this time. This batch is made with tomatoes (cherry ones from the garden), yellow and orange bell pepper (as I didn’t have any green or red), peaches, cilantro, red onion, jalapeño peppers, lime juice, and salt.
This salsa is perfect with chips, but also goes well with fish or chicken. If you would like to get the recipe from a previous post on Peach Salsa, click here. There are two other blog posts with peach recipes~~Tomato, Peach and Corn Salad (which is delicious!) and homemade Peach Pie.
We will be picking more peaches today and maybe peach ice cream this afternoon? At some point, my family will tell me they are “peached out”. That is my cue to preserve the rest of the harvest.
Have a peachy Tuesday!
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