What was I thinking?
When I bought those peaches in the grocery store the other day? Well, I know what I was thinking — I was thinking that I needed some fruit for breakfast, and since oranges are really going out of season (I know, they’re not local, but it’s not perfection we’re after here at LivingSmall), I thought I’d give the apricots, peaches, and plums that had just come in a shot. I lived in the Central Valley long enough to learn that at least they’re coming into season there, and stone fruit from California seemed less egregious than grapes from Chile, so I bought a mixed sack.
People, peaches are not supposed to be crunchy!
It’s not even that they taste bad — they just taste wrong. The apricots are pretty good — not great, but at least they don’t have a texture that is entirely false to their essential nature, and the plums are okay too, but not great. At least when I buy oranges I can find nice heavy ones, and they fundamentally taste like oranges. These are like Stepford-fruit.
And so, like Michael Ruhlman and his bad chocolate chip cookies, I’m stuck working my way through a bowl of stone fruit that just makes me sad. Looks like I’ll just have to skip fruit with breakfast until the raspberries and cherries start coming down from the Flathead, or at least until the guys with the trucks of fruit start showing up from Washington. That fruit at least tastes like fruit. And maybe, if we’re really lucky, Maryanne will go to Colorado to visit her elderly mother in July and will bring back some of the legendary white peaches of the Grand Junction/Delta valley. Now those are peaches. Peaches of one’s dreams.
6 thoughts on “What was I thinking?”
I can’t find the exact recipe I used, but last summer I roasted stone fruit (in a skillet) and topped it with a balsamic reduction and it was excellent. Maybe you can “supplement” your fruit and it will be less disappointing? This recipe is similar to the one I used:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_33822,00.html
Thanks Kristi — I wound up making fruit salad out of it all. It’s just so upsetting to get bad produce — and my own fault — I know it’s out of season. I guess that’s the thing about starting to eat in season — you can really tell the difference and for me it’s just not worth it to pretend that that crunchy thing is a peach, or those watery styrofoam-y things are tomatoes.
Not much is in season at the moment, and it gets difficult to be patient, I know. I hope you’re getting better stuff very soon.
In two weeks we start getting our local CSA shares, and I’m very impatient for it. This is our third year with the same farm, we’ve been very pleased before with the vegetables, so we’re really looking forward to getting them.
I had some of those peaches last September. They are amazing. We grilled them. They made a syrup as they cooled. The skin slipped right off. We put them and the syrup over icecream. I have never had peaches like those. I want to move there just for the peaches.
I dated a chef in Telluride years ago who used to make the most astonishing dessert — half a Grand Junction white peach, a disk of bittersweet chocolate, all sitting in a pool of raspberry coulis. It was dreamy. If I hadn’t been leaving town for grad school I would have married him for the peach thing alone …
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