This dessert and I had a few go-rounds – mostly involving tofu and lots of strawberries. All of the versions tasted good, but I just wasn’t satisfied, so I decided to go back to the drawing board one more time. I used raw cashews instead of silken tofu, and I threw some fresh raspberries into the mix. The result is this not-too-sweet, refreshing summer treat.
For the recipe, visit One Green Planet. Oh – and by the way – I’ve just joined the world of Tumblr. You can find my very simple blog (just photos of my recipes) here.
The standard pastry crust makes me feel guilty. Me, the one who snarfed down the cinnamon-sugar coated scraps that my mom baked up after completing an apple pie. Me, the one who carefully ate around the thick and nubby, crusty rim of a pie and saved it for very last. I’m the one who always preferred a little bit of filling with a whole lotta flaky crust. But, I just can’t really do it any more.
I’ve been sticking like (well, something like) glue to my Sweets Only On Days That Begin With An S commitment, but even on those days, I’m finding that I don’t have a craving for over-the-top, sugary, calorie bombs. And – I don’t have the freezer space to store leftovers. Which is why desserts for two are perfect – especially desserts for two that don’t require the oven. No sugar, no oil, completely unrefined and jam-packed with flavor. These cakes rise to double their size and have a spongecake-like texture.
Twenty dollars later, Kel and I became the proud owners of a giant box of locally grown peaches, each one picture perfect. Peaches grow everywhere in Bountiful, weighing down the gnarled trees in nearly every backyard, tempting us – begging us to relieve the poor branches of their juicy payload. Yes! we reply, but quickly remember that we would be trespassing. Peaches are summer – the beginning of the end of summer – and baking a peach pie is a sacred rite of the season.
I’ve done nothing special or innovative here. I just baked a standard peach pie; cutting way back on the amount of sweetener simply because these peaches were as sweet as candy just as they were. Why mess with a classic? So, I’m not including a recipe here. Buy yourself a mess of peaches (8-10 will do), dig up your mom’s tried-and-true crust recipe (I used the one on the back of a bag of Bob’s Red Mill Whole Wheat Pastry Flour) and get to work.
This is an ode to peaches and freshly-baked pie; warm nights, Queen Anne’s lace, the chainsawing of crickets, gardens gone wild and the whiff of melancholy that accompanies the precious, honeyed days of late summer.
Your crust might not fully cooperate (as mine did not) and it may become a homely mess once placed onto a plate (as mine did), but it will taste sweet and delicious (as mine did). It will taste like summer and make you want to hang on to every last second of August even as the days get shorter. The memory of your peach pie just might carry you through the dark days of January and February. Remember, those peach trees will be out there, covered in snow, racking up the necessary cold hours, dreaming of the spring to come and the chance to overload their branches yet again with golden-red fruit.
Kel and I eat a small fruit salad every morning alongside our hot grains cereal (with slices of banana on top), have fruit with lunch and we conclude dinner with more whole fruit. Getting fruit is not a problem for us. But I rarely make a fruit salad with dressing. The collusion of an interesting-sounding sauce from a Cooking Light Annual cookbook and my grocery offering lovely pineapples, mangoes, kiwis and strawberries made me think it was time to put together something special for after dinner one evening. The dressing on this has so much flavor – a little zing from the lime and basil which is balanced by the sweet date sugar. I think this dressing would be delicious with some mint leaves thrown in. One thing – this salad is best consumed the day it is prepared.
Sometimes when it’s cold and gray out, you want something warm and comforting, and sometimes…you want something as bright and cheerful as the summer sun. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather drink a few of these than pound the vitamin C tablets.
(This is a recipe from Vegetarian Times. It appears here pretty much unchanged – I just reduced the amount of maple syrup.)