The last of the peaches. Parental scoffing notwithstanding, I found using up 25 pounds of peaches a formidable task. Despite making six quarts of canned peaches, four jars of peach jam, peach salsa, grilled peaches, and freezing a sack of peeled, sliced peaches for future use (a cop-out, I know), last week several bruised, wrinkly peaches, the remnants from my haul, still regarded me forlornly from the dry sink. Continue reading
High on the list of the many things my mother does very, very well in the kitchen is pickling and preserving. During the summertime, my telephone conversations with my parents usually go something like this:
Me: What have you been doing?
Mom/Dad, triumphantly: We now have 27 quarts of blueberries from our own bushes!
Or,
We bought a bushel of tomatoes at the farmstand!
Or sometimes,
We picked three huge baskets of chanterelles!
And then later,
Your mother made the most incredible [insert] [jam/pickles/sauce/pie/vegetable tart/canned peaches/pears/plums]! Continue reading
The end of summer is bittersweet. In the Pacific Northwest at midsummer it gets dark at 10 p.m., but by the end of August the days get shorter, the nights cooler, and the rain begins to return. This summer in Seattle has been glorious, and Labor Day weekend has given us a last burst of sunshine. Next week, however, it is going to rain. And rain. Hello autumn. Fortunately the markets are still full of splendid peaches, nectarines, and beautiful Italian plums, the last taste of summer.
I was in the Yakima Valley, in Eastern Washington, this weekend for a wedding. Yakima Valley is peach country. (It is also wine country, but that is a story for another day.) In Union Gap, a tiny town whose largest employer is a fruit packing company, I lost my mind and bought 25 pounds of canning peaches. At home, I spread them out to ripen and thought, “I had better do something about those nectarines.” Continue reading
This summer I was deputized to take charge of my family’s Fourth of July dinner. As I am an obsessive and a planner, I decided what I would make weeks in advance: pork shoulder marinated in my homemade jerk sauce, then cooked in my dad’s smoker for eight or ten hours until it was meltingly tender. This is the kind of food project that appeals to me: slow cooking, with just enough wonky food science to cue in the never-distant internal third-person narrator. Also, in London, I don’t have a barbecue, so I have become increasingly fixated on the direct application of fire and smoke to food. Continue reading
Susan eats London 