GEORGIAN PEACH KOMPOT, A FIRST TRY

The peaches have been just great this year in Ontario and the northern US too.I wanted to get a head-start on recipes, and with fruit such a hugely important part of the Georgian larder, and in so many delicious ways, I wanted to start with two Georgian fruit preserves.

I made sour cherry moraba, delicious, but not quite as thick-syruped as those I had in Georgia. I am still working out why that is.

And I made peach kompot. It was entirely successful, thanks to my friend Tamar Babuadze in Tbilisi, who consulted several friends and their mothers too and passed on their instructions and advice. The peach kompot I had tasted in Georgia, made in Kutaisi by Elena’s ninety-one year old grandmother from peaches from her garden, was my standard. That came in a large wide-mouthed jar, and consisted of whole peaches floating in a pale pink very light and unbelievably delicious syrup. But the jars I had, one-litre jars, had mouths that were too small to take the large ripe organic Niagara peaches I had bought at the farmers’ market.

No problem said Tamar, of course you can cut them.

And so I did. She also told me that peeling them was optional. I peeled some, and left some unpeeled (just well washed); I prefer the look of the unpeeled ones, I’ve decided.

I posted on FB and was asked to supply the recipe. So here are the instructions in a slightly rough and ready format.

Be sure to get all your equipment ready first, and to follow the canning instructions, or substitute instructions from a reliable canning cookbook or handbook. The acidity of peaches is nice and high, so they don’t need a very long boil in the canner, unlike lower-acidity foods.

Get ready the following: 

- 1 quart/1 litre glass canning jars or substitute 650 ml (20 ounce) jars; for each 6 quart basket of peaches allow 3 large jars. Or you can use smaller 2-cup jars.

- Two-part lids for each jar, new ones, with no rust or nicks out of them

- A canner, or substitute a very large tall* pot with a lid, and also a rack in the bottom that the jars can stand on. (*How tall? You need to be able to boil the jars in the pot, with an inch or more of water covering them.) Check to see how many of your jars fit at one time on the rack in the canner.

- Tongs for lifting the jars out of the boiling water

- A large heavy tray or baking sheet and a rack that fits on it (to place the jars on to cool once they have been processed)

Ripe peaches, preferably organic, at least one 6-quart basket 

Sugar: 1 cup of sugar per litre/quart jar; 2/3 cup sugar per 20 ounce/650 ml jar; ½ cup sugar for every 2 cup/500 ml jar.

Kettle of boiling water

Wash the jars and lids in very hot soapy water, and rinse well, or wash them in a dishwasher, then fill them partway with hot water and place them on a tray by your stovetop.

Place a rack in the canner or tall pot, fill the canner or pot with hot water, and place on the stove.

Wash the peaches well in hot water. Cut out any bruised patches and trim off any stems. If you wish, peel them (I think it’s prettier to leave the peel on). If the peaches are too large to fit through the mouths of the jars, cut off chunks leaving pieces as large as possible; I leave in the pits too.

Working with one jar at a time, empty out the hot water, then fill the jar with peaches, not forcing or bruising the fruit. When the jar is half full, add half the sugar needed for that size of jar (see above). Then add more peaches to fill the jar, and then other half of the sugar.

Pour in boiling water from the kettle, pausing to allow bubbles to rise to the surface, until the water is up to the jar neck. Place on a flat lid and screw on the other piece of lid, until just tight, not extremely so. Repeat with the other jars until you have filled as many as will fit in the canner.

Place jars in the canner, being sure that they are upright and not on a tilt. The water should be covering the jars by a generous 1 inch or more. Add water if needed. Put on the canner/pot lid and bring the water in the canner to a rolling boil. Once it is boiling, you can lower the heat a little, just so long as a boil is maintained. Boil for ten minutes.

Place a rack on your counter or on a baking sheet, then lift the jars out carefully, keeping them vertical, and place on the rack to cool.

(If you have a second batch to do, repeat the jar-filling and boiling process.)

After ten minutes or so you should hear each jar lid go “pop” or “click” as it seals. Once that happens, take off the rims and wipe off the glass, then put them back on and tighten a little. Let the jars cool completely, then label them and store in a cool dark place.

The liquid will gradually get infused with peach flavour. This nectar is a real treat in the wintertime. So are the peaches.

SKILLET CAKE FOR ANY TIME OF YEAR, & OTHER PLEASURES

It’s Saturday night, "date night", and here I am at the computer. It’s not as bleak as it might sound: I’ve had a great day of market, lovely bicycle ride, and then supper with friends here in my kitchen and garden. Time to sip a little rose d'Anjou and feel grateful.

But before I do, I need to talk abut the skillet cake. I have had a number of requests for the skillet cake recipe, and it’s time to put it out again.

This cake started when I was doing recipe development for HomeBaking, a book that came out in 2003 co-authored by my ex-partner Jeffrey Alford. I am very proud of the book: the artisan breads, etc especially, but also the effort in the book to demystify pastry and baking generally.

When I began work on it I tended to be intimidated by the idea of pastry and cakes. And so I felt I needed to analyse where those feelings of inadequacy came from and address them. One way I did that was to make up a cake recipe, just out of my head, using proportions that were easy to remember, so I could make it without reading a recipe, and without special equipment. 

That is the origin of the skillet cake. The recipe in HomeBaking calls for only 2 eggs and either all-purpose flour or a blend of all-purpose and pastry flour (for a more tender crumb). Since that time the recipe, or I should say, the cake I make, has evolved. Rather than using one large skillet, I make two cakes, each slightly smaller than the original. I have increased the eggs to four, from two.

And most importantly, I now prefer to use Red Fife flour for the cake, a whole wheat single varietal flour. It has wonderful taste and baking properties.

So here is the recepe set out anecdotally, my "Everyday Skillet Cake", to be interpreted as you wish:

You need one larger heavy ovenproof skillet (11 or 12 inch diameter) or two medium to small ones (I now use a 9-inch and a smaller 7 or 8 inch one too), cast-iron really is best; you could also make it in a rectangular cake tin I guess. I have done that in other people's kitchens.

Preheat the oven to 400 F; rack in the middle.

Find your skillet(s) or baking pan. Grease lightly with olive oil (or butter but I find oil works better).

Best if butter and eggs are at room temp. (See *** below for preparing the fruit topping now if you need to wait for the butter to soften a little.)

In one bowl cream together a generous 1/4 pound butter with 1 cup sugar (I tend to use a demerara, but whatever), then set aside.

In another bowl go 2 cups flour: use 1 cup each whole wheat pastry flour and all-purpose if you want, or – my preference - use all Red Fife (available at many farmers' markets). Don't worry.

And onto the flour go 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, plus 1/2 teaspoon salt (or so) a generous amount of cinnamon if you like, some powdered cloves and powdered ginger if you like and just stir to mix. Set aside.

Back to the butter and sugar: Add a generous 1 cup (so in fact about 1 1/4 cups) plain full fat or 2 % yogurt and stir well. Add 4 large eggs and beat to make a kind of heavy foaming mixture. You can add a small splash of real vanilla extract if you want.

Pour the egg mixture into the flour etc and stir just enough to wet everything. It will be thick and wet. If you are including wild blueberries, as I like to do in summer (or you might have frozen ones, just fine), add them now and fold over a couple of times.

Pour it into the oiled skillets and put into the oven. 

Lower heat to 380 F after ten minutes.

Meantime (****or you could do this while you're waiting for the butter to soften, if you forgot to take it out of the frig early enough), heat a little butter in a skillet and add chopped apples or peaches or mango or pear (yum) , a little sugar or maple syrup (not with the pears; I'd add some lemon juice instead), some cinnamon and/or cloves, and cook briefly just to barely soften and bring out flavour. (You can skip the butter if you are using peaches or pears or apricots and just add sugar and a splash of white or red wine for extra flavour and liquid as they cook.)  You can use chopped rhubarb, but then you'll need to cook it with a tiny amount of water and add generous sugar and maple syrup. Taste to check that you like it. 

You can also make a mixture, say of peaches and blueberries or whatever, as it pleases you. You want about 2 cups cooked fruit plus some liquid, but really amounts don’t matter.

When the cake or cakes have been in the oven about 25 minutes the top will have set a little. Lift out the skillet(s). Distribute the fruit and juices on top and put back in. 

The whole thing takes about 45 minutes usually to cook through. Use a skewer into the centre or near it, to test for done. You can sprinkle on a little extra sugar about ten minutes before you take them out: a crystallised light brown sugar is attractive.

Once they come out of the oven, let stand for ten minutes, then turn out onto a plate and then onto another plate so it is fruit side up. Or serve from the skillet.

There you have it...

Leftovers are great for breakfast, because they’re real food, not just intense sweetness.

We had anther skillet cake this evening, sitting outside in the warm summer air, a group of friends and I. We’d begun with some fresh Berkshire pork, raised in Grey County out in a field, and slaughtered this week. I’d been up at the pig’s home farm last Sunday with Dawn the Baker (Marvellous Edibles), and so I hurried to Wychwood Market this morning because I knew there’d be fresh (not frozen) pork. It was so delicious, remarkable…a roast cut into steaks, grilled, then sliced. We had lemon wedges so people could squeeze on a little juice, but really nothing was needed.

I was so happy to have the skillet cake, made of wheat grown in Ontario, an old variety developed here, called Red Fife (with a lovely natural sweetness to it), and topped with Ontario peaches and blueberries, as a part of the meal, a wonderful complement to the pig.

So lucky to have local food, grown with care, to work with. As a friend of mine says, a huge part of the secret of good cooking is good shopping.

Happy summer everyone...

THE WORLD OF HITS AND MISSES AND PEACHES TOO

Another hot and humid day here in Toronto. It feels very tropical. Sounds carry, as well as smells, both the lovely and the stenchy. The lovely include the haunting scent of phlox (mine are white) that drifts and eddies around the back garden and in the back door.

Speaking of eddies, I've had rivers and light and color on my mind this last while. I've been engrossed with images for Rivers of Flavor, picking final ones from a larger Burma pick. And now they are all sitting queued up (so interesting that the tech people, whom I always think of as American in their language, should have turned to "queue", a more classic English word, but I guess queuing is a clearer meaning than "lining up" or "waiting") and getting sent off one by one, as they load onto Artisan's FTP space. Words fail me: is it an FTP portal? or file? or dossier? or dock?

And as they load up and head out one by one, I'm reminded of the turtles I saw long ago on an outlying island of Sabah, north-east of the port town of Sandakan, then a sleepy-hollow place. Maybe it's bustling now. I haven't been back since 1980.
I was with a friend and we were taken out to the Turtle Island by Parks people. We spent the night there, at about this mid-August time of year, now I think of it. YIkes! That was 31 years ago.

At around one in the morning we headed out under the full moon, on the fine white sand, to wait on the beach. We were lucky that night. First one, and then another and another huge dark shape came out of the water and lumbered across the beach sand to its upper edge: turtles, come to lay their eggs. We crept close to one as she stood digging with her strong stubby legs, a hole that grew deeper and deeper. The sand flew. Then she turned her tail to the hole and began to let the eggs go. They emerged in a gleaming stream, some and then more, white and pearlescent in the moonlight. Eventually, once she was done, she used her strong legs to heave and push sand back into the hole to cover the eggs.

The parks people marked the spot with a post. Meantime the turtle, her work done, headed for the beach, leaving tracks like a tank, a continuous drag mark with evenly spaced dents too. And then into the water she slipped.

Well in a silly superficial way this moment of sending off images into the e-sphere feels a little like what happens when those eggs hatch. The little turle-lets head off to the sea, but who knows how many of them make it? It's part of nature's lottery.
And the process of sending images or letters or manuscript through the e-ther feels a little the same, a fraught and chancy thing.

Maybe I should revise my view: maybe all interaction, all sending out of messages and trusting they will be received, is just as much of a lottery or game of chance. The imperfections of communication are not just technical, not just a matter of something going physically awry (like a bird picking off a baby turtle, or the electricity cutting out in the middle of a transmission). Those are bad luck but in the end understandable. The others, the misunderstood comments or actions, are much more complicated, and more scary too. For example the response that is heard as critical or angry but wasn't meant to be; the silence that was meant to leave breathing room but is read as abandonment or uncaring; the praise that is real but is heard as ironic, all these are the truly scary slippages and losses. Sometimes it seems a miracle that we ever understand each other at all.

When I start to think about the fraughtness of human communication, I reach for consoling thoughts and ideas. After all, most often we DO seem to understand each other. Maybe we're fooling ourselves, and there are more gaps in our mutual understanding than we know or acknowledge, but we soldier on. And we do that because we WANT it to work. We want to understand others, and to be understood. And we want tolerance for (and always need to remind ourselves to BE tolerant of) mistakes and miscues.

How did I end up here, when I started with the scent of phlox in the garden? Maybe the idea of familar scents connects to childhood and memory and then leads to reflection on the larger meta-picture? I guess that's it.

For now, I need to absorb this place I've arrived at, which is the reminder to give people the benefit of the doubt when there are misunderstandings and to be tolerant when things go astray, in whatever way that happens. After all, that kind of imperfection is part of life too.

Now there's something to think about.

Meantime the peaches are in, lush sweet fabulous Ontario peaches. It's a great year for fruit here. Today at the Dufferin Grove Farmers' Market there were also huge blackberries and lots of elderberries too, so enticing. I bought two six quart baskets of peaches, organic peaches, for five dollars each. What a bargain, all that easy to eat juicy complexity for the price of a coffee and muffin. Amazing.

May the rest of August be as delicious and fruitful...

SIMPLE TECHNIQUES AND SIMPLE PLEASURES

It's late on a muggy Tuesday evening. No not muggy: Muggy is too negative a word for the soft warm air that bathes me as I sit here in Toronto writing. It's a word used by people who find this summer heat too aggressive and hard to live in. Winter cold is so chilling, and lowering to the spirits, at least by late February, that it seems unwise and in fact deeply ungrateful to complain about life-giving summer heat. Ah here she goes preaching again! you'll say.

Let's start again and say that it's a warm tropical-feeling evening here in Toronto!

Had another lovely time in Grey County last weekend, celebrating two seventy-fifth birthdays, one of a bookseller friend, and the other, on the same day, and at the same party, the birth of Penguin, the publisher. There was a Penguin motif at the birthday party and much pleasure and good conversation. And after, as I drove to a friend's place to overnight in peace and silence, there was time to reflect on the passage of time, on things taken for granted (publishing houses, long life) until they become fragile or threatened. As always, "in the moment" living is what we need, for sure. Enjoy the 75 year (or 25 year or 90 year...) marker, and try not to think too much about the number of years we do or do not have left.

Who knows? after all. So there's no point worrying about it, as I wrote last week. I am still working on cultivating a "so what?" looseness about eventualities. It sure has lightened my load, and added to the general happiness in my world.

And meantime I have begun to tweet. It's a wild world of haiku-like bursts, compressed thoughts, an anti-logorrhoea (sp?) tool! ( Prolixity is easier to spell...) A friend says it has led her to interesting information and people, quick connectedness with a large world.

On the subject of long and short: Longer distances beckon when I run in the morning these days. I'm loving it, but trying not to be too tempted into more kilometres. After all, I don't want to end up with knee or hip problems, and too much wear can sure lead there. On the other hand, what am I saving myself for?

It's the same balancing with money I think: Save it for a possibly long life? but who knows when it might get cut short? So why not enjoy the moment and worry about the money when the time comes, rather than ahead of time. it's an age-old issue and balancing act. The trick, the important thing, is not to get stressed about it. Just enjoy whatever decisions you make and live with them.

A friend said the other day 'Our job is to enjoy life, to be creative when we can, and otherwise to take good care of people and the earth and things generally.' It's not a bad basic code, don't you think?

Meantime, we need to eat, and the last few days have been fun: Had some amazing peach pie made by a friend up north, summer in a mouthful. I think it was a Crisco crust, but light and not soggy, the peaches perfect.

Last night, still on the yellow fruit theme, I used bright yellow tart plums to make a relish-chutney- salad. I would like to put it in the Burma book (saying clearly that I haven't eaten it there), for it's in the groove or style of the flavour palate, with minced shallots, some fish sauce and chiles, shallot oil used to heat and pop some mustard seed (a south Asian touch that gives a toasted depth) and... chopped mint or coriander leaves and salt. In any case it was great with grilled flat-iron steak, my new favorite cut. And on the grill went eggplants (long Asian ones) and shallots and garlic, for a mild, non-chile'd nam prik makeua. It was so smoky and flavorful, just way more than the sum of its parts.

Chile-garlic sauce, my favorite condiment from the Burma kitchen, with soaked dried red chiles, raw garlic, rice vinegar, sugar, salt, and fish sauce, as always had an important place on the table. I've doubled the recipe for the book, for why make a small quantity when it's getting eaten so quickly??

This evening I made an improvised salad of cooked chopped sweet potato, all beautiful colour and tender texture, tossed with cold cooked rice and fresh pea tendrils (the fine kind) and lots of minced herbs whisked into an olive oil vinaigrette. The mint and basil were from the garden, punchy and fresh. I should have put it in a purple bowl, to set off the glamorous orange of the sweet potato. It was a great pairing with grilled fresh sausages (pork with fennel seed and chiles) from Sanagan's (and again more of that chile-garlic sauce, yum!).

My charcoal grilling is getting very confident, at last. I'm working to use as little charcoal as possible. In Southeast Asia people are so skilled and economical with charcoal. It is another of those learn-it-over-a-long-time life-skills that I am happy to work on.

Simple IS good!