A pear of aces: candied ginger and upside-down cake

It has come to my attention that there are people out there who don’t like pumpkin pie. I’m not sure I know any personally, but assuming it’s true, what do you offer them for dessert on Thanksgiving?

Chocolate is a common default, but it hardly seems seasonal enough. It also doesn’t celebrate America’s agricultural bounty, in the spirit of Thanksgiving. Cocoa beans aren’t grown here, and you probably won’t see Hershey bars stuffed into a cornucopia centerpiece.

You could make yet another version of Apple Something-or-Other, but it’s so easy to apple yourself to death between September, when the new crop arrives, and the end of November.

So what about pears? Are they fall’s forgotten fruit?

While we’re all tripping over ourselves to go apple picking and pumpkin patching, no one is eating pears. Per capita every year, we eat around 14 more pounds of apples than pears. Pears are just as American as apple pie. (Most are grown in Oregon, Washington, and California.) They're no more difficult to prep or cook than an apple, and they play nicely with all those warm spices we like to put in everything from coffee to cronuts at this time of year. So, why avoid them?

Several years ago, while searching for a fall dessert that was a bit flashier than pumpkin pie, I found this recipe in Sunset magazine. It’s a spicy, sticky, brown-sugar-glazed amalgam of two American favorites — gingerbread and upside-down cake — and it really tastes like fall. 

Serve it with lightly sweetened whipped cream, and even pumpkin pie worshipers might not miss their favorite Thanksgiving sweet.

Pear and Ginger Upside-Down Cake

2 tablespoons plus ½ cup butter, at room temperature
1½ cups firmly packed brown sugar
3 tablespoons chopped crystallized ginger
2 firm, ripe pears
2½ cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
2 large eggs
¾ cup dark molasses
1¼ cups buttermilk

Lightly butter a 9-inch cheesecake pan that has a removable rim and is at least 2½ inches tall. Line the pan with a 10-inch round of cooking parchment, pressing it into the bottom and about ½ inch up the sides. Cut 2 tablespoons of butter into about ¼-inch chunks and drop them evenly over parchment in the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle evenly with ½ cup brown sugar and the crystallized ginger.

Peel the pears and cut them in half lengthwise. Then, slicing parallel to the cut edge, cut them into ½-inch-thick slices (although, they work just fine cut in a ½ inch dice, too, if that's easier for you). With a small knife, cut the core from the center slices. Arrange the slices flat, in a single layer, over the sugar mixture in the pan, trimming pieces as needed to fit. Don't worry how it looks at this point. Once that brown sugar, candied ginger, and batter start bubbling together and up through them, the finished product will look just fine.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, ginger, cinnamon, salt, and allspice.

In another bowl, with an electric mixer on medium-high speed, beat remaining ½ cup of butter and 1 cup of brown sugar until well blended. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Reduce the mixer's speed to medium-low and beat in the molasses. Add the flour mixture and buttermilk alternately, beating until incorporated, then beat on high speed just until well blended. Pour the batter over the pears.

Bake in a 325° regular or 300° convection oven until a toothpick inserted in center (not in fruit) comes out clean, 1 hour and 35 to 40 minutes (cake center may settle slightly). Let the cake cool in pan on a rack for about 20 minutes, then remove the pan sides. Invert a platter over cake, then, holding the two together, invert again, so that the pears are on top. Carefully remove the pan bottom and parchment. Serve warm with lots of lightly sweetened whipped cream.

Shuck and cluck: chicken paillards with sweet-corn salad

We all have that one dish in our file that motivates people to ask us for the recipe. For me that dish is sweet-corn salad.

As tasty as it is, there is nothing novel or fancy about a corn salad—especially not its name. However, if for the purposes of this post we can agree that French culinary terms impart a certain level of swankiness, let's make this dish a bit more deluxe by adding the tender slices of lightly pounded and sautéed poultry known as paillards. We'll call it Paillards de Poulet with Sweet-Corn Salad. 

See what I mean about French?

At Farmstand Foodie HQ, sweet-corn salad is regarded as the ultimate summer food. Complemented by tangy tomatoes and bright basil, it hits all the high points of the hot season. Add a serving of chicken, and you elevate this salad to main-dish status. 

While we humans may be warm-weather weary when early September rolls around, it’s jackpot time for fresh produce. Even my humble little vegetable-and-herb plot is spitting out basil, chives, and grape tomatoes like a loose slot machine. That’s probably why this lightly pounded, sautéed chicken (A paillard is simply meat that's flattened with a mallet to cook quickly.) with barely cooked vegetables is one of my favorite late-summer meals to make. I can just walk out the back door, gather ingredients, and have dinner on the table in about 45 minutes. It’s also a nice way to dodge the monotony of buttered corn-on-the-cob that we tend to experience by late summer. 

This isn't a particularly difficult meal. But as with a lot of simple dishes, where fresh ingredients can't hide behind a sauce or complicated preparation, you'll earn extra points for technique. Your attention to detail will be rewarded. Try to keep the individual pieces of chopped onion roughly the size of a corn kernel, and the garlic pieces very fine. Both aromatics are lightly cooked in this salad, and aiming for a petite cut allows them to cook quickly and ensure no one gets a disagreeable bite of raw onion or garlic. 

You'll also notice the basil in this dish is handled two ways: some is chopped; some is torn.  Chopped basil begins to turn brown pretty quickly, and it will discolor even further when added to the hot corn mixture. The heat, however, tames its licorice-like bite and provides a more layered flavor.  Torn leaves don't discolor as rapidly at the edges, and adding them right before serving, when the corn is cooler, will help the basil to better retain its color and add a fresh, herbal flavor. It also makes for a prettier plate of food.

Also, before you remove the kernels from the cob, slice the tip from the cob and and place the flattened end in either an upside-down bundt pan or small, footed bowl that has been placed in a larger bowl to catch the kernels. You’ll appreciate this step if you’ve ever cut corn from the cob and watched it bounce, Superball-style, around and off your counters, right before skittering under your refrigerator. 

As for the paillards, I use chicken breast tenders because they’re easy to beat into submission and they cook in a flash. However, you could easily substitute boneless, skinless breasts. They work just great, too. If you don’t feel like chicken, ditch the bird and serve the salad as a side with any grilled meat or fish. A mess o' garlicky prawns comes to mind, but you might consider calling those shrimp crevette.

Chicken paillards with corn, tomato, and basil

Makes 4 servings

4 tablespoons olive oil, divided

1 tablespoon minced garlic

1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh basil, lightly packed
all-purpose flour for dredging (about 1/3 cup)

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

3 tablespoons snipped or chopped chives, for garnish

For the corn salad:

6 large ears corn, husked (about 4 cups of kernels)

1/3 cup finely chopped white onion

1/4 cup torn basil leaves (very small leaves may be left whole), lightly packed

1 cup halved cherry or grape tomatoes (quartered if large)

3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar, traditional or white (traditional will discolor the corn a bit, but have a mellow flavor; white will leave you with bright, shiny corn, but it's a bit sharper tasting) 

1 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt           

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

Using a large, sharp knife, cut corn kernels from cob. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and onion and sauté 1 minute. Add corn and sauté until just cooked through, 3 to 5 minutes. Your corn may begin to brown slightly, but don’t over cook. You want a little corn-on-the-cob-style crispness to remain. Remove corn from heat. Add chopped basil.

Transfer corn mixture to large bowl. Cool slightly, stirring occasionally. Stir in tomatoes, vinegar, 3 tablespoons oil, and torn basil. Taste and adjust seasonings if needed. Set aside.

For the chicken:

1 1/2 pounds chicken tenders

all-purpost flour for dredging (about 1/3 cup)

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

3 tablespoons snipped or chopped chives, for garnish

Using a meat mallet or heavy pan, pound chicken tenders between sheets of plastic wrap to about 1/4-inch thickness. (Three or four good whacks should do it.) Pat chicken dry. Season with salt and pepper, then dust with flour to coat, shaking off excess. Melt butter with oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Add chicken to skillet and sauté until cooked through, about 2 to 3 minutes per side (cut to test for doneness).

Mound corn salad on a platter and top with warm paillards of chicken. Garnish with more torn basil and snipped chives.

Blue redux: Fluffy ricotta pancakes with honeyed blueberry sauce

No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t yet had my fill of blueberries.

The season is getting long in the tooth, but the stragglers still trickle in, and they make for a delectable honey-spiked sauce that really dresses up a pancake.

Unfortunately, we are not really a house full of pancake people. We love America’s favorite breakfast food as much as the next family, but refined-flour, syrup-sweetened flapjacks don’t love us. To be honest, you do not want to hang around a post-pancake me. An hour after I eat them I have a sugar crash, and then I’m grumpy, woozy, and hungry all day. Yes, we live a sad and mostly pancake-free existence—or rather lived, because I found a solution: ricotta. 

Ricotta cheese is mild, and the slightest bit sweet. If you have ever set foot in a kitchen, or know someone who has, you have seen it work well in a variety of dishes, from pasta to cheesecake. Most important to me is the fact that ricotta put hotcakes back on the menu. Combined with the eggs in this recipe it packs the protein that many people require to get them all the way to lunch, while still allowing you (ok, me) to enjoy something that tastes and feels like a genuine pancake.

While it's true that cheese in flapjack form is a huge selling point for the simple-carb-intolerant among us, the word ricotta doesn’t usually belong in the same sentence with “fluffy.” Some ricotta-based recipes are very heavy, resulting in a final product that can best be described as leaden. Turns out the cure for that is beaten egg whites. They add a nice puff of air to the batter that makes it almost soufflé-like, so you won’t feel as if you’ve just eaten a 2-year-old’s mud pie.

Pour a cup of coffee and dig in.

Honeyed blueberry sauce

2 cups fresh blueberries

1/4 to 1/3 cup honey, depending on the sweetness of the berries

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest

2 tablespoons lemon juice

Stir the blueberries, honey, lemon zest, and juice in a medium saucepan. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat to maintain a simmer. Stir occasionally until slightly thickened, about 10 minutes. (You want the sauce thickened, but not so thick that the juices have turned to jam.) Remove from heat and set aside.

Fluffy Ricotta Pancakes


makes 8, recipe adapted from The Kitchn

1 cup ricotta cheese

3/4 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1 1/2 tablespoons sugar

pinch salt

3/4 cup milk

3 eggs, separated

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

About 30 minutes before you start cooking, set the ricotta in a fine mesh strainer, to drain off excess liquid.

In a bowl, whisk together flour, nutmeg, baking powder, sugar, and salt. Combine ricotta, milk, egg yolks, and vanilla in a separate bowl. 
Beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until stiff peaks form. Add the dry ingredients to the ricotta mixture, stirring gently until just combined. There will be some lumps. Don’t over mix, or you’ll end up with a tough cake. Whisk in a small amount of the egg whites—just a few tablespoons—to lighten the batter, then gently fold in the remaining whites. You don’t want to stir because you’ll force out all that air the egg whites have captured for you.

Heat a griddle over medium-high heat, and brush the surface with oil. Use a 1/3 cup dry measure to pour batter onto the griddle, flattening slightly if necessary. Cook pancakes for about 3 or 4 minutes, then flip, cooking until both sides are golden brown.

Serve topped with warm blueberry sauce and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

Blueberries: puff-pastry crostata, the smart tart

I don’t care for pie. There, I said it.

It’s a crust thing. I don’t enjoy making it. In my hands, crust is finicky and unpredictable. To me, crust is just more trouble than it’s worth because—as long as I’m confessing all sorts of un-American thoughts—I’m really not even all that crazy about eating it. I’d rather just scrape off the filling and donate my crust to someone who appreciates it. This is probably why I’ve never spent the time to perfect my technique. I have no game where piecrust is concerned.

I do, however, enjoy puff pastry. To me, it’s the prettier, hipper sister in the dough family. Puff pastry is Marcia Brady; piecrust is Jan. Puff pastry begins like piecrust, with cold butter, flour, salt, and water. But the ingredients somehow work together differently, for a lighter, more buttery result with an almost croissant-like flake. Puff pastry is also tricky to make well, which is (Shhh…) why I let Pepperidge Farm do it for me.

While I realize that piecrust and puff pastry are not always interchangeable, I try to switch out crust wherever I can, in places such as pot pies, turnovers, and, more recently, this Italian-style blueberry crostata—or galette, if you’re feeling French. Frozen pastry makes this dessert fairly quick and easy, especially if, like me, you consider yourself a non-baker.

Most important, a rustic tart allows the fruit to be the star of the show, as it should be in summertime. So, when I found blueberries at the high-season price of just 99 cents a pint, I simplified this recipe from Chow.com. If you really love to make your own crusts, by all means go check out their version. If you aren’t above pulling pre-made pastry out of the freezer, come sit next to me.

If you can do a little rolling pin work, dump on a pile of blueberries, and employ rudimentary folding skills (No origami. I promise.), you are about 10 minutes from putting a crostata in the oven. You won’t even have to wash a pie plate when you’re finished because you transfer the whole shebang, on parchment, to a baking sheet that’s been preheating in the oven. About an hour later, a gorgeous dessert is served. The next morning, eat the leftovers drizzled with plain yogurt, lightly sweetened with honey. It blows away a Pop-Tart.

Now go buy some blueberries while they’re still cheap.

Blueberry Crostata

All-purpose flour, for dusting

1/2 cup granulated sugar

2 tablespoons cornstarch

1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest

1/8 teaspoon table salt

1 pound fresh blueberries (About 1½ dry pints. Do not use frozen.)

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

Small bowl of water, for brushing crust

2 teaspoons coarse sugar, such as turbinado (optional)

Thaw frozen puff pastry according to package directions.

While the crust is thawing, heat the oven to 400°F and place a rack in the middle of the oven. Put a baking sheet on the rack to heat with the oven (don’t skip this step, or your crostata will suffer from soggy bottom).

Cut one piece of parchment paper about 14 inches long. Place it on a work surface and dust it lightly with flour. Place the thawed dough on the floured parchment, then dust the top of the dough lightly with flour. 

Roll out the dough into a shape that approximates a 12-inch circle, repairing any cracks around the edges. You will most likely be starting with a rectangle, so your circle will not be perfect. That’s ok because we’re going for rustic here. In fact, you will probably still have pointy edges when you’re finished rolling. Just trim those off to form a shape that is more circular.

Slide the dough, still on its parchment, onto a large platter or cool baking sheet (not the one from the oven). Put it back in the refrigerator while you mix the filling. 


Place the sugar, cornstarch, lemon zest, and salt in a large bowl and whisk to combine. Add the blueberries and lemon juice and gently fold to coat the berries.

Remove your pastry, parchment and all, from the fridge, and pile the blueberries and sugar mixture in the center of the dough, leaving a border of about 2½ inches all the way around the fruit.

Fold the edges of the dough over the blueberries, leaving 1/2 inch of space between the inside of the fold and the edge of the filling. This will allow your fruit some room to ooze as it bakes. 

Pleat the dough about every 2 inches as you go, to maintain the crostata's circular shape. Repair any rips by dabbing a little water on them and gently squeezing the dough back together (make sure to seal any holes in the dough, or the juices will escape and burn while the tart bakes).

Gently push the blueberries down to slightly flatten. Brush the pastry edge lightly with water and sprinkle just the top edge with the coarse sugar, if using. 

Remove the hot baking sheet from the oven and transfer the tart and its parchment onto it. Bake until the pastry is golden and the blueberry juices are bubbling, about 35 to 40 minutes.

Remove from the oven and let the tart cool on the baking sheet on a wire rack for about 10 minutes. Remove the tart and parchment from the baking sheet and return them to the wire rack to cool, about 20 minutes more. 

When cool, slide the tart from the parchment onto a large cutting board. Slice into wedges and top with whipped cream or ice cream. Both, if you’re feeling frisky.

Gazpacho: If you can’t stand the heat, get into the kitchen

According to every single Facebook post I read last week, no matter where you live, you were hot. Welcome to summer, the season we have already had just about enough of, and it’s not even August yet.

If there is one truth about summer, it’s this: When the thermometer reaches three degrees short of Hell, your first instinct will be stove/oven avoidance. And while entering the kitchen—especially to make soup—will seem counterintuitive at this point, there’s really no better time to break out the gazpacho, your own personal culinary cooling unit.

Think of gazpacho as a salad—a salad for people who are too hot to chew. Just like most of the salads we reach for during warm spells, the ingredients in gazpacho are raw. Also, as with many salad dressings, gazpacho offers the brightness of vinegar, sharp edges smoothed by oil. It even has croutons, sort of.

Over the years, I fiddled and futzed with various gazpacho recipes. They were either too watery or too chunky or too cucumbery. None really grabbed us until a few years ago, when I discovered this one printed in the newspaper food section. It’s from a bistro in Oregon (aka the state from I which was dragged kicking and screaming as the result of a job relocation). It’s creamy and full of layered flavors, but somehow still bracing in warm weather.

The soup is concocted over a two-day period, so while it requires a bit of preplanning, you will have the bonus of a refreshing 24-hour break between phases. You’ll get plenty of time to wipe away the sweat of exertion as your gazpacho relaxes in the fridge for a day, chilling away, mingling ingredients, and developing flavor. (Avoid the temptation to open the door and climb in with it. The gazpacho doesn’t want to see you now.)

Day 1 of Project Gazpacho involves some boiling, peeling, and chopping. Sure, you can let your food processor do the hard work. Day 2 involves some light exercise with the strainer, but since gazpacho is served chilled, there’s no hurry to get it done right before dinner. You can do one or both of these steps in the cool morning hours, before you take to your chaise for the day with a glass of lemonade or start uploading photos of your car's thermometer readings to Facebook.

If you like tomato soup in the winter, you’ll probably like gazpacho in the summer. But maybe instead of the traditional grilled cheese accompaniment, you’ll serve it with some crusty bread and Spanish cheese. Honestly, though, this soup is filling enough to stand on its own, as a light summer meal.

Before you peek at the ingredients, a warning: You will no doubt shake your head and mutter “Oh, no. No way.” when you see the amount of olive oil contained herein. But stay with me. It is absolutely necessary for flavor and texture. Besides, the monounsaturated fatty acids in olive oil are heart healthy—much better for you than the animal fat in that combination pizza you were going to have delivered, just so you didn’t have to turn on the oven.

Creamy Gazpacho

Recipe from the Silver Grille, Silverton, Oregon

Serves 4 as a main; 6-8 as a starter

1 pound ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and chopped

2 cups peeled and chopped cucumber (about one large cucumber)

1 ½ cups peeled and chopped carrots (about three large carrots)

1 ½ cups peeled and chopped fennel bulb (about two medium bulbs. Save some of the fronds for garnish if you like)

1 large red bell pepper

2 large cloves garlic

1 teaspoon Tabasco sauce (or to taste)

4 ounces of dry bread, ground into crumbs (about 2 cups crumbs)

¼ cup sherry vinegar

2 teaspoons kosher salt and ½ tsp. freshly ground black pepper (or to taste)

1 cup extra virgin olive oil

Put a large pot of water on to boil. While the water is heating, cut a small X on the bottom of each tomato. When the water is boiling, carefully add the tomatoes. Boil for about 30 seconds, or until you see the skin loosening at the X, up to one minute. Remove the tomatoes with a slotted spoon and set aside to cool.

In the meantime, chop or break the dry bread into roughly two-inch pieces. In the bowl of a food processor fitted with the steel blade, grind the bread chunks into crumbs, the largest of which are about the size of a small pea.  Remove crumbs from the food processor and set aside. If you didn’t weigh out 4 ounces of bread, measure your two cups now. Freeze any additional crumbs in an airtight bag for another use.

If you don’t mind a little knife work, chop the cucumber, carrot, fennel, red bell pepper, and garlic. If you want to use the food processor to do your chopping, cut the vegetables into rough two-inch pieces and chop each separately. They can all go into the same bowl as you remove them from the processor. Once all vegetables are chopped, add them back into the food processor or blender with the Tabasco sauce and the crumbs. (I think my blender works better for this part, so that’s what I use.) Process until smooth and refrigerate overnight, or at least 8 hours.

The next day, return the vegetable puree to the food processor or blender. With the machine running, add the vinegar, salt, and pepper, then slowly drizzle in the olive oil. Taste and adjust salt and pepper if necessary, then push the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer into a medium bowl or large measuring cup, pressing with the back of a wooden spoon to extract all of the liquid.

Refrigerate until ready to serve in cold bowls or cups. Garnish with some chopped fennel fronds, if you like.

Peaches: Georgia on my cake

I’m not sure if this post is about peaches or bourbon. But since this blog is about eating in season, and I can get bourbon whenever I please (except Sundays, in this state), we’ll pretend it’s about peaches.

I like bourbon. I like to cook with bourbon. Sometimes, though not often, I even like to use bourbon for its intended purpose, and drink it. We have two kinds of bourbon in our house: the good stuff is in the liquor cabinet; the cheap stuff is in my cooking-alcohol cupboard, where I keep the tipple that, while technically still fit to drink, doesn’t cost an hour’s worth of paycheck when a dish needs a little enhancement.  Ok, ok, so it’s cheap booze, but it works fine for building flavor.

There are things in life that bourbon just makes better, and I’m not referring to romantic breakups, bad days at the office, or Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute bands. I’m talking about foods with a little natural sweetness, a trait that the round, smoky tones of bourbon really seem to play up with subtle butterscotchy goodness. Yams come to mind here. So does BBQ sauce. The other day, when I walked into the little meat market near us, peaches did.

Being from the West Coast, where peaches are grown commercially in all three states, I’m not sure I had ever tasted the iconic Georgia peach. Evidently, here in Indiana, just two relatively squat states away, we’re close enough that they might even be our “local” peach. The butcher shop I frequent carries a small stock of seasonal produce, often from local growers. On my last visit, they had positioned a big bushel of The Peach State’s finest front and center, and when I walked in I could smell them almost as strongly as the odor of the bacon smoker they keep out back.

The combination of wood smoke and peach scent must have triggered a recipe memory, because I drove home and roasted those fuzzies with some maple syrup and—wait for it—bourbon! Then I added them to what has become the husband’s favorite baked dessert that does not involve chocolate: a buttermilk cake. 

This is a cake that is neither light nor delicate. It’s dense and, honestly, maybe even a little coarse. But we’ll be polite, and call it rustic. It’s also not terribly sweet, as cakes go, but it’s very moist and carries just a little tang that really complements the concentrated sweetness of roasted fruit. And that rough texture really soaks up the sauce (Not to mention melting ice cream.) Oh, yeah. Like a sponge, it does.

I’ve made it with strawberries, and I’ve made it with plums, but I can already tell the version made with those pie-eyed peaches is going to be a regular summer sensation around here.

Roasting is also a great way to use slightly mushy peaches that may have gotten away from you in the fruit bowl. And even if you skip the cake, just roast the peaches and put them, still warm, over ice cream (Vanilla bean and pecan-praline would be both be good places to start.) or alongside roasted or grilled pork. 

Bon appétit. Or should I say, cheers?

Maple-bourbon roasted peaches

6 large or 8 medium-size ripe peaches (I think softer-fleshed clingstone types work best here. Freestones tend to be firmer, so you may not get quite as much juice.)

1/4 to 1/3 cup pure maple syrup (Amount may vary depending on the natural sweetness of the peaches. But, please, no artificially flavored pancake syrup. Spend a couple bucks more for the real thing.)

1/3 cup bourbon—or more, if you really like bourbon

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Place a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. In a small bowl, whisk together the maple syrup, bourbon, olive oil, and salt.

Peel and seed the peaches. Tip: blanching peaches loosens their skin and makes them much easier to peel. (For future reference, this works on nectarines, plums, and tomatoes, too.) To blanch, boil a large pot of water. While the water is heating, make a small x in the base of the fruit. Once the water is boiling, add the fruit, making sure the peaches are entirely submerged. Leave them for about 40 seconds. If your peaches are slightly under-ripe, allow them to remain in the hot water a little longer—up to a full minute. Remove them from the water with tongs or a slotted spoon, and allow them to cool enough so that you can handle them.

When the peaches are cool, with a paring knife, slip off the skins and cut them into wedges that are about ½-inch thick. Lay the wedges in a 13x9-inch baking dish. Pour the bourbon mixture over peaches and toss to coat. Then place them in the oven.

After about 15 minutes in the oven, the peaches will start sweating a bit of their own juices into the bourbon sauce. Give them a stir. Then close the door and set the timer for another 15.

About 20 minutes into roasting, you’ll really start to smell them. At the end of the second 15 minutes, stir again. But be gentle because they will be beginning soften, and we don’t want peach jam. Around this time, you may start to notice the juices are thickening a bit and browning around the sides of the baking dish.

Put the peaches back in the oven for another 15 minutes. At the end of this 15 is where you may have to start making some decisions. Every batch of peaches is different. The variety of peach as well as its ripeness level will affect the amount of juice they shed in the roasting process. You want browned, caramelized fruit, but you also don’t want things to dry up so much that you have none of that peachy, mapley, bourbony sauce for your cake. So if the peaches look like they need more browning, but much of the sauce has boiled off, add ¼-½  cup of water before you stir again.  If the peaches look as though they need more time in the oven, go in 10-minute increments, because things move faster at this point.

Roast the peaches for a total of 45 to 60 minutes, until they are golden with some browned spots, and the juices and syrup have thickened to about the consistency of that pure maple syrup. 

Remove the peaches and their sauce from the pan while still warm.  Place in a small bowl, and set aside.

Buttermilk cake with maple-bourbon roasted peaches

(Recipe adapted from Joy the Baker)

2½ cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs

1½ cups buttermilk

1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

roasted peaches

3 tablespoons turbinado sugar for topping (Use brown sugar in a pinch, but it won’t give quite the same crackly, crunchy, sweet crust over the top.)

Place a rack in the center of the oven and heat to 400 degrees F.  Butter an 11-inch cast iron skillet.  (You can also use an 11-inch round tart or quiche pan, or a 9×13-inch baking pan, although the cake will be thinner, and you’ll need to keep a closer eye on it in the oven.)

In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.  Set aside.

In a small bowl, whisk together buttermilk, eggs, and butter. Whisk in the vanilla extract.

Add the buttermilk mixture all at once to the dry ingredients. Stir until just combined and no lumps remain, but don’t overwork the batter. Spoon batter into the prepared pan and top with about half of the roasted peaches and half the maple-bourbon-peach juice. Sprinkle with the turbinado sugar.

Bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean. Do not over bake, or you’ll have dry cake. Allow the cake to cool to room temperature before slicing to serve.  Serve with the remaining roasted peaches, if you wish, a scoop of vanilla ice cream (best ever!), or softly whipped cream. Drizzle remaining syrupy juice over the top.