Peas + Ricotta on Toast

Where have I been these long months? It would be accurate to say I was busy, off on research. After a long day of interviews, without a kitchen to cook in, more apt to eat out than in. And that would be true enough. But, I have a dark secret. Something else has been keeping me away from creative pursuits in the garden, kitchen, and online. A quick fix, a simple pleasure: gardening phone games.

I managed to avoid the Farmville bonanza that took many a Facebook friend by storm a few years ago. The addiction I saw broadcast in my news feed warned me against trying my luck in the digital fields. But this past December, after becoming attached to my phone for a solid week because of a boulder game (in hindsight, it wasn’t that fun), I was in the market for another game. When a gardening game put on a holiday theme, it was promoted in the app store, and before long, I was hooked.

And there went the last 4 months of my life.

I exaggerate, of course. I largely haven’t played the game since early February, when I practically beat it. And in my defense, there were no gardens for me to tend in the winter or on the road. Cooking out of other people’s apartments proved difficult. So I’ll forgive myself for my transgressions into digital farming.

The addiction is quite simple to understand. It’s the quick turnaround that really hooks you: the dream that plants could grow in mere instants, before you eye. A glorious, conceit.

In practice, seeds can take weeks to sprout, particularly on a cool windowsill in early April. Once planted, gardens unfold over months from light green to ripe fruit. Still, the pleasure there is greater from the waiting.

The only thing that seems to grow almost as quickly as a digital plant, transforming before your very eyes, are pea shoots. A few days of water shock, an inch or two of soil, some sunlight -- even diffuse: that’ll do it in about a week.

A lot of the magic happens beneath the soil, as the seeds push thick, white roots every which way at an incredible speed. I forgot to take a picture, but if you try some sprouts, take my advice and plant them in a glass jar so you can see their hidden progress underneath.

We’ve been back in our own apartment for the past two weeks. By the time we arrived, I had been making a list of all the foods I’d been longing to make. Complex concoctions requiring a standing mixer or rare ingredients best found in North American stores. (Travel and you will quickly discover many items you consider staples are simply not available in other countries’ grocery aisles.)

But since we’ve been back, with spring peeking in day by day, the thing I most want to eat doesn’t require much fussing at all. It’s simple, with a rotating cast of ingredients, and just a bowl and fork needed for mixing: mashed peas with ricotta on toast.

Where this idea came from, I can't surely tell you. It's one part seasonal obsession, another part simplicity. It was also the best meal I ate last June in France. A humble offering of bread, peas, ricotta and a few choice herbs -- served as a main in a restaurant in Grenoble. Brilliant.

That, and Pollan's Cooked has me obsessed with toasting things. I have always adored toast, but a passage in the book told me why. It turns out when you heat things up at a high temperature, the proteins and amino acids bend and break into thousands of other molecules. This is why caramelized things taste so delicious: they're complex and unique. Toast is surely the fastest route to such a trick.

So with fresh pea shoots at hand, and a lack of familiarity in my own kitchen, I've been eating a lot of peas on toast. I’ve had it three times since being back, each time a little different than the last. It's simple fare that can be dressed up or down or even sideways, depending on what's in your pantry or fridge, or even sprouting on your windowsill.

And it's a lot more satisfying to grow yourself some sprouts and eat them, than playing a silly phone game. I'll take an obsession with toast over an obsession with pixelated bread on a screen. With spring coming, it's time for me to get back to gardening -- for real this time.

Peas and Ricotta on Toast

A bunch of peas, shelled. Ideally fresh, but can be frozen too.
About half a container of ricotta
A few slices of good bread
Leeks or chives
1 lemon zested + a squeeze of two of the lemon juice
Mint or basil or pea shoots
Olive oil
Parmesan cheese
Salt + pepper

1. Toast your bread.
2. Boil your peas to cook, but only briefly, until they're a little brighter and have softened. Fresh likely need 5 minutes or less. If you're using frozen, they need just a couple minutes.
3. Drain the peas and cool them down under some running water. Tamar Adler would tell you to save that cooking liquid for your impending stock. So, you could do that. Or you could just strain the peas.
4. If you're using leeks, sauté them in some butter or olive oil. Butter is surely more delicious. You want them to be browned. Also, you can use the green tops of leeks - my American friends seem to think you can't, but I assure you, you can. They're like the green tops of scallions. Just cook them longer if you're worried that they're tough.
5. Zest your lemon, chop up your herbs of choice -- roughly, grate your parmesan. You can put all this on top of your peas. Mash the peas with a fork or if you are blessed enough to have one, a potato smasher. The idea is to smash the peas a bit, but don't overdo it: use your good judgement. Add the ricotta, as much as you like, and some olive oil. Taste liberally! Add the salt and pepper. Add those leeks if you're using them. Squeeze in your lemon squeezes and taste some more. Adjust accordingly. If you want to go dairy free, then do that! This is delicious with or without the cheese.
6. Now you have a big delicious bowl of the stuff. Put it on top of the toast and garnish however you like. I put some sprouts, some salt or some parmesan on top. Eat! Leftovers work as a side if you've run out of toast.

Bougatsa for the New Year

Months have passed since I last came to this space. The garden kept growing until December, and even now there's tuscan kale popping up from the snow. But the winter has me down a bit: no gardening, a dry apartment, and yet another head cold. To think, as a kid winter was my favorite season -- what with christmas and my birthday and snow forts to build outdoors. But these days, I'd be happy to avoid winter altogether. And that, dear readers, is exactly the plan this year.

In just 5 days (!) I'll be off: first to Mexico, then to Arizona, Texas and California. And finally, New Zealand and Australia! All for dissertation research, well, that and a bit of a birthday holiday on the beach.

Of course, the time between now and then feels infinite. We're subletting our apartment so everything is everywhere. Clothes in piles, closets emptied, stuff scattered on all available surfaces. We've barely been cooking at all -- with the lack of a farm box or a garden, it all feels less urgent. And with all the packing, it seems somewhat impossible.

But I carved out a small piece of time this morning, when the snowy light was still good and bright, and baked something I've been meaning to bake for years: bougatsa.

What, do tell, is bougatsa? Why the most delicious of greek desserts made of semolina custard! When dry, the semolina looks like soft, yellow sand. When cooked, it is sweet and nutty.

In Toronto, there is an excellent greek bakery on the Danforth called Athens. I first discovered this flaky, custardy, cinnamony deliciousness while in high school. It's quite simple: you order some bougatsa and sit down to a plate full of little phyllo squares, filled with custard and topped with cinnamon and sugar. About halfway through, your blood sugar levels have spiked and you're starting to feel crappy. But you just can't help yourself! It's too delicious to leave any on the plate.

For my own version, I went a bit more refined and a lot less sweet. I added meyer lemon and half a vanilla bean; substituted in some cream; cut the sugar and didn't bother adding extra egg yolks.

After reading half a dozen recipes, I settled in with one that looked authentic. Unfortunately, it was also inaccurate. Despite stirring and whisking and adding another egg and cooling and stirring some more, the damn custard would not set!

I asked my husband to research what makes custard set, and low and behold, it turns out there's an enzyme in the eggs that needs to be cooked in order for them to bind to the starches in the flour. So after applying some higher heat and stirring quickly with a wooden spoon, miraculously the whole thing came right together. Then out of the pan and into the oven. 30 minutes later, we were having a greek breakfast pastry, albeit at this point it was for lunch.

I can't say if I'll be cooking too much in the coming months, as we live out of suitcases and stay in other people's apartments. Instead, this blog may be more travel snapshots than cooking stories. Less recipes and more tales.

So I leave you with this last one for now. I don't know if any of you have tried out my recipes. But I assure you: bougatsa is worth trying. And given how hard it is to track down (I've tried at every greek restaurant across europe and north america), it's best to make it yourself. Below, is a place to start your own obsession with greek pastry. Happy new year to you! If you're stuck with the winter, I hope you bake yourself something delicious.

Bougatsa

Serves 2-4 people

3/4 cup milk + 1/4 cup cream (or 1 cup milk if you don't want to bother with cream)
1/2 meyer lemon peel grated (or just a regular lemon if you prefer)
5 tablespoons butter + more for phyllo
3 tablespoons semolina flour
2-4 tablespoons of sugar, depending on your taste (I did 2.5)
3 eggs
1/3 vanilla bean (spliced pod and paste goes into milk) or 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
phyllo pastry (if frozen, thaw in fridge overnight or put out on warm counter 1+ hour before)
cinnamon and powdered sugar

1) Heat the oven the 350.

2) Combine the milk, cream, lemon zest, vanilla bean in saucepan on low heat. Add the butter when warm and whisk to combine when it melts.

3) While whisking, sprinkle in the semolina.

4) Beat the sugar and 3 eggs in a bowl. If you're using vanilla extract, put it in here.

5) Turn up the heat to medium and slowly add the eggs. Stir with a wooden spoon on medium heat until a custard forms. Turn up the heat more if it's not thickening but make sure to scrape the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon as you go so nothing burns. Once it turns to a custard, put aside to cool (or in the fridge if you are impatient like me.) If it's not coming together, you need more heat.

6) Lay out 6 sheets of phyllo on a buttered baking sheet and between each one brush with melted butter. Add the custard in an even spread and then fold the phyllo in half. Butter the top of the phyllo.

7) Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes until lightly browned on top.

8) Chop up into little squares (pizza roller works great!) and sprinkle with cinnamon and powdered sugar. Ideally, eat warm for a delicious breakfast. Supposedly doesn't re-heat well, so if you have leftovers, just eat cold. Ask yourself why you've never tried bougatsa before and promise yourself you'll make it again soon.

Stir Fried Asparagus Beans

Some night this week, the first frost will set in and the growing season will be over. The garden had a lot of successes this year. From a small container, I produced 4 sugar baby watermelons. Never mind that a squirrel got one of them, or that another never grew past the size of a pool ball. For Zone 6, I'd call any watermelon a success. The last one was still out there in early October, growing away, six inches across.

The dinosaur kale came in thick and dark green. We grew lots of tomatoes, in all shapes and sizes, even in a year where tomatoes were slow going. And the carrots are still coming up, thickening away under the soil.

But the biggest success this year goes, hands down, to the asparagus beans. When I first sowed the seeds back in April, I thought of them as an experiment. I'd bought them at the hardware store on a whim, not from a fancy seed catalogue. When the shoots started to twist and climb, their leaves were nothing remarkable; quite thin compared to the other pole beans I'd planted. And their flowers, arriving in June, barely resembled flowers at all.

Then I spotted some ants on the ends of the long, stick like buds. With each return to the plants, I would find those ants again, crawling just around the flowers. If you look closely in the photo above, you can see an ant nestled between the two flower buds on the right. I became suspicious that these plants were ant pollinated, and indeed they are. The plants must put out attractors that invite the ants to come visit their flowers.

Once the flowers are pollinated, the thin beans begin to form at the tip of the bud, pushing the dried-up flowers outward, as seen on the left part of the photo above.

But the beans weren't just attracting the pollinators: they were also drawing in curious neighbors. When we got our first crop in early July, we were out of town. The beans grow fast, thickening and lengthening with each passing day. When full length, they look like garlic scapes, or more imaginatively, garter snakes. No one could make heads or tails of these strange vegetables we were growing. My neighbor took a photo of his baby next to the bean, and showed it to me when we got back: the bean was longer than the baby. The beans became a conversation piece with my neighbors.

Apart from the beans, getting to know our neighbors has been the highlight of the garden this year. I've gotten to know the kids living in the building next door -- their personalities, likes and dislikes. We've been invited to kids' birthday parties, including one themed "ballerinas and drummers" and another themed "medieval times."

The hockey stick, duck-shaped watering can and big pink ball littered around the raised beds are all artifacts of the childrens' time spent in the garden. The kids would often want to help me harvest my bounty, particularly the funny shaped asparagus beans. A full batch would find us picking around two dozen beans, alongside a handful of ripe cherry tomatoes.

The kids were always disappointed when the picking came to an end. "Are you sure you don't need me to help you harvest anything else?" the six-year-old girl downstairs would implore. But the end did come -- no more beans to harvest that day, and soon, no more garden for six months to come. We'll just have to start again next year. Asparagus beans are already on my list.

Stir fried Asparagus Beans

1/2 pound asparagus beans AKA chinese long beans (around two dozen beans)
2 tablespoons butter or safflower oil
Pinch chili pepper flakes
2 tablespoons diced shallots
1 tablespoon freshly minced ginger
1 tablespoon freshly minced garlic
2 tablespoons vegetable stock
1-2 teaspoons honey
1-2 tablespoons (toasted) sesame oil
Salt and freshly cracked black pepper
2 tablespoons sesame seeds (optional)

Cut the asparagus beans into 1-inch long pieces. Heat up the oil under medium-high heat, ideally in a wok, and add the red pepper flakes. Add the shallots and cook for a few minutes, until beginning to brown. Add the ginger and garlic, cook for 1 minute. Add the beans and cook for a few minutes until starting to brown and soften. Add the vegetable stock, and keep tossing the beans until most of the liquid has evaporated. Add the honey, sesame oil, salt and pepper and toss to coat. At the last minute, add the sesame seeds, and serve on rice.

Single Varietal Tomato Sauce

Back in the spring I poured over catalogs. I sprouted and watered and killed many a seedling. I stared at young plants for nearly half an hour, pondering which would best grow in my garden. I tried to conjure up their future fruit in my mind, with only a name to guide me: Sungold, Brandywine, Copia.

My husband was adamant -- we would have tomatoes! Lots of tomatoes. There really was nothing quite as worthwhile in a garden as a tomato, he claimed. That and the savings! Oh the savings. Heirlooms by the pound are pricey indeed. We didn't have much space but it would have to do. Yes, growing them in high density was the only way. Blight be damned!

So we grew green varietals, like the Green Zebra and Green Cherokees shown here. And we grew cherry tomatoes -- Matt's Wild have rave reviews, so we tried a few from seed. We grew some standard red ones, like Rose de Berne and Watermelon Beefsteak, and a mixed bag of heirlooms. But my favorite by far was Valencia.

I picked the varietal randomly, after staring at names on wooden stakes for twenty minutes. It was late May and our wedding anniversary, and we were out to lunch to celebrate. On the way, we passed a stand with plants. To my husband's chagrin, I cannot walk by plants in spring without buying just one or two. Nevermind the lunch ahead, the long car ride home, or the overnight stay in a hotel room: the plants were coming with us. And after mulling the options, I picked Valencia on a whim.

The first tomato came early, way back in July. It grew until it was round and large, shaped exactly like a pumpkin. When the deep orange colour came through, the transformation from tomato to squash was complete. An early riser, it was already ripe.

I was home alone and carried that single tomato upstairs like a baby bird, admiring its shape and color. I ate half of it fresh for dinner with mozzarella and basil. The next night, when I was stuck alone another day thanks to a cancelled flight, I consoled myself with the joy that the second half would not go to waste. Instead, into the pot it went with a bay leaf, some dried thyme and oregano. The sauce came out sweet and orange. It was my first foray into single varietal tomato sauce, and it was a success.

Sure -- I'd made delicious homemade sauces from vine ripened tomatoes bought from the store. But this was different. I was growing the plants, making the resulting fruit seem rare and precious. Cooking was almost blasphemy.

But this first foray inspired me. And when we went peach picking in August, and discovered they also had heirloom tomatoes, I went out of my way to get a good variety. When we got home I was adamant: we should sort, then chop and reduce and can. We should honour each tomato's essence by making single varietal sauces.

At first this seemed silly, but the results were exciting. We made spicy arrabbiata with San Marzanos. We made one with Brandywine, using a few big specimens. And we made more sweet Valencia sauce.

All this growing and picking and canning different varietals got me curious about where these tomatoes came from. Some basic research put Valencia's origins in Maine. The story goes that a family saved this seed for generations.

Further digging placed its ancestry in commercial varieties from the 1940s. Going backwards in time, it could trace roots to Sunray, then Jubilee, who in turn came from a Tangerine and Rutgers cross. As the name implies, Valencia has taken more if its visible characteristics from it's Tangerine side than from Rutgers. Developed by the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, Rutgers first appeared in 1928. It has an ancestor with a tomato linked to Campbell's Soup -- a pioneer in packaged foods first on the scene in 1869. To think my own plantings share this storied history! Tomato ancestry is just as exciting as tracing a family's metaphorical tree. It's easy to imagine the little tomato trees stretching back through time.

In contrast, Valencia's green cousins above were only developed in the 1980s and 90s. Yet their names are already common. Another friend was growing Green Zebras in her garden this summer. How quickly seed spreads to the four corners of the globe! The tomato's diversity in shape, colour and taste is extraordinary and enticing. It's not surprising we allocate so much space in our gardens to try out a few new types -- whether they're a new cross or they're only new to us.

My tomatoes march on, and week by week they produce more fruit than we can handle, particularly in combination with our farm share. My husband has taken to eating a sliced tomato every morning for breakfast with labne on toast. And I've taken to making more and more tomato sauce.

The only things that will stop this flow are the blight and the frost. I've been reading Michael Pollan's early book, Second Nature, this summer and he warned of blight in those pages. I was cocky, and didn't believe such a tragedy could grace my green stalks. But just last week I noticed yellowing and spotting leaves. My father claimed the tomatoes lacked nutrients, but thanks to Pollan I knew better. This was a fungal blight. The only action was to remove as many infected leaves as possible, and fast. Since then I've been watering the ground rather than spraying the beds. This strategy has slowed, though not halted, the blight's progress.

But frost too can not be halted. The days are shortening, and my garden is showing the strain. The bean leaves are yellowing, as are the optimistic watermelon's many fronds. With the equinox right around the corner, this much is clear: my tomato days are numbered. Better to make as much tomato sauce as possible while the bounty lasts

Simple, Single Varietal Tomato Sauce from Scratch

Ideally, start with a single tomato varietal. But if you don't have enough of one type of tomato, this recipe will still work just fine.

4-5 medium tomatoes
1 medium onion
2-3 cloves of garlic, diced
Some butter and/or olive oil
2-3 bay leaves
2 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1/2 teaspoon dried
2 sprigs of fresh oregano or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1 sprig of fresh sage or 1/4 teaspoon dried
1 sprig of fresh rosemary or 1/4 teaspoon dried
dash of chilli flakes (optional)
salt and pepper

1. Chop up your onion. Put a pan on the stove and turn it up to medium heat. Put in about half a tablespoon of butter or olive oil. Let this heat up, then add the onions. Cook for about five minutes until the onions start to brown, then add the diced garlic and herbs and cook for another minute. If you're using the chilli flakes, you can either put them in the oil before you add the onions, or add them now.

2. While the onions are cooking, cut up your tomatoes into one-inch chunks. If they're bigger that's fine too: it will just take a little longer for them to cook down. Once the garlic has cooked for about a minute, add the tomatoes to the pan. Add some more olive oil, remembering the joyous and rigourous mediterranean diet findings. Add some salt and pepper

3. Let the sauce cook over medium heat uncovered for about 15 minutes, allowing the tomatoes to break down. If you need to, add a tablespoon of water here and there to keep the sauce from burning, but this should be unnecessary unless your tomatoes lack water. If I have some open, I'll add a splash of red wine and then serve that wine for dinner. If the sauce is too acidic, I'll also add a teaspoon of sugar; but if your tomatoes are ripe, this is unnecessary. Once the sauce has reduced, turn down the heat to low until you're ready to serve it. The longer you cook the sauce (without burning it!) the sweeter, more concentrated and more complex the flavor.

4. Serve with pasta that you cooked once the sauce started simmering. Pick out the big herbs if you used fresh leaves, particularly the bay leaves. Enjoy tasting tomato sauce from one, unique tomato varietal while you marvel at nature's diversity.

A Field Guide to too many Peaches

For my final summer holiday, I spent five days in mid-August with my husband and two close friends in Pittsburgh. Sometimes when you go on vacation there is just no break, escape or sense of lightness. Your high expectations are dashed by delays, expense and exhaustion.

But this was a true holiday, even with a few work sessions packed in between and many long days on the road. We watched documentaries, cooked meals, went to art galleries and ate good food. Nothing felt demanding or negative. Life just sailed pleasantly by.

On our last night in Pittsburgh, the four of us worked together to put together dinner. Everyone humming along at the same pace, in a big kitchen, pitching in with their part of the meal. I don't think I had cooked in such a collaborative way before. It was joyous and effortless.

My contribution was peach pie, another first. I'd never had peach pie before -- not even a slice -- so baking one was an experiment. But, like the holiday, it came out perfectly. Not too sweet. Not too much liquid. Just flaky crust and golden hues. I was in love.

After such a euphoric first-peach-pie experience, I was feeling bold. I decided that what we really needed to do was drive out of town to an orchard and pick some peaches -- for pies, for canning, for jams and more. We couldn't have too many peaches!

But the peach picking went surprisingly fast. The fruit was ripe, the weather cool. It was a perfect day. Plus the farm had dropped the price per pound because there were too many to go around. After filling 4 pecks, I was hardly content. So I convinced my husband we really needed some heirloom tomatoes too. And just a couple raspberries.

To our hefty load, we added 4 more pecks of tomatoes. At this point, we were up to 80 pounds of ripe fruit. Thankfully the raspberries weren't anything special, so we showed due restraint, and just bought a pint.

When we arrived back home that evening, the euphoria from the fields was still hanging around our kitchen. Why not make single-heirloom tomato sauce? (More on that in a future post.) How exciting would that be? My husband mentioned we might just want to can whole tomatoes, and cook them into sauce later, what with the 80 pounds of fruit we had to deal with. But I paid this thought no notice -- we really needed tomato sauce, not whole tomatoes -- and we got to work.

By 11:30 PM, we were up to our ears in tomato sauce and exhausted. We hadn't touched the peaches.

That night I dreamt I made a peach pie without a lattice top. I was horrified! How would the juices steam out? How would I ensure the right consistency? After one pie, I was clearly an expert. This would not do.

I awoke, resolved to make peach pies worth their salt. That and peach popsicles, peach infused liqueur, canned peaches, peach jams. And while I was at it, why not throw in some peach hand pies? Last night's exhaustion dissolved, I recommitted to peaches in winter.

We counted our peaches: 120. No small feat. We would need to get strategic about this. After some back of the envelope peach-to-pound-ratio calculations, we settled on a full itinerary for the day.

With Deb Perelman -- peach-obsessive -- as my guide, I decided I would make two more of her pies, given how much success I'd had the first time around. And why not try her bourbon hand pies while I was at it? I had some failed vanilla bourbon lying around from a stint at making vanilla extract a few years ago -- that would do just the trick.

But pie making was labour intensive, and even with some optimism, these pies would only eat up a quarter of our supply. My husband would need to start canning. And making jam. And maybe even try his hand at some peach popsicles.

If all else failed, we could chop up the remaining dozens and freeze them for smoothies later on. Yes, this would be simple.

Except the day became the evening, and the peaches sat untouched like a still life painting in the front room. We got started late, and by 5:00 I had dumped unlabeled icing sugar into the pie dough instead of flour. It turns out we were out of flour. I would have to go to the store, and start again. So pie making began at 6PM.

I made six pie shells. My husband blanched and peeled peach after peach. We started measuring out precise ratios of acid to sugar for the canning. We started getting stressed. Was it just me, or was it hotter in here than yesterday? The steam was starting to get to me.

After exhausting Neko Case's collected works, I began to have doubts about this whole enterprise. The hand pies just didn't look like the pictures. My filling was runny. Maybe the peaches were overripe, and refusing to hold onto their juice? Weary of rolling pins, I kept putting more filling into each hand pie than recommended. We were exceeding the safe dough-to-liquid ratio. The first two pies ended up on the floor, peach filling everywhere. This was not going well.

But onward! These peaches were not going to put themselves up. I filled and pinched and rolled and cut and did the whole thing again. Until I was out of dough. I made 22 hand pies that night; my husband canned 7 jars of peaches, and 7 jars of jam. This was progress.

Still, I went to bed with no proper pies to show for my effort. The crust sat resting in the fridge, the anointed peaches still bore their flesh. That effortless first pie was feeling quite far away.

The third day of peach-fest-2013 I was determined: this had to end. I would have two pies with beautiful latticed tops in the freezer by noon. Working as a team, I rolled out the now stiff crust with significant muscle, while my husband measured and stirred and strained out extra juice.

The pies, while more watery than my perfect-first, would be delicious. I just had to get them into the freezer. Oh, and it needed to be flat. Never mind that our tiny freezer was overflowing with strawberries picked in June and those hand pies from the day before. We were freezing these pies now, god dammit!

When the lattice tops were finished, the extra dough was bagged, and when enough space had been cleared to freeze the pies on a flat surface, I asked my husband for the updated count. Three peaches left. That's it? What happened to slicing and freezing a bunch?

No, no. This was fine. Well and good. We had enough peaches left to riff off these popsicles, substituting light cream rather than the recommended healthier alternative. I fussed and fretted, clearing more level space to freeze the popsicles. And then, it was over. The peaches, like summer, were gone. Only the mess left over to clean tomorrow.

Post Peach-picking resources

If you find yourself with too many peaches after an ambitious day in the orchard, let me recommend the following recipes and resources.

- Put 'em up is an excellent, basic canning and preserving book. She has recipes for peach salsa, peach jam, canned peaches and more.

- Smitten Kitchen has tons of peach recipes, including the aforementioned peach hand pies and basic peach pie. Both are delicious.

- Peach bourbon: Put 2-3 blanched, skinned and halved peaches in a jar and cover with bourbon (other people recommend vodka, so you could try that instead. Not my thing.) Put in a sliced vanilla bean if you are fancy. Stir daily and check after 3-5 days. Remove the fruit and strain. You can eat the fruit if you like. If you are full of extra time, you could grill the peaches before infusing. No doubt this is delightful.

- Peach juice: If you find your peaches, like mine, are overripe then strain off some of their liquid before making pie fillings. I did this for the pies and it worked out much better than the runny hand-pie batter. You can store the peach juice, which is delicious, in the fridge and mix with seltzer tomorrow.