Peeking into the rock

So I bought peaches at Costco. K likes great big juicy peaches and is not impressed with the wonderful little ones from the farmer's market. So I thought, these are big and beautiful, and surely if you're selling produce to restaurants, you'll have good produce, right?

The peaches were "organic." But I believe they have been bred to have that sweetcorn sugar in them, because they are sweet and grassy flavored when they are crisp, but once they get tender they are neither sweet nor flavorful. At no time--with an exception I'll explain in a moment--do they taste much like a peach.

So I was desperate. And I experimented, as I always do when my food is problematic. Well, a lot of the time, anyway. First I microwave the peaches in batches of four for nine minutes (I had eight). Then I poured the beautiful but not very intensely flavored pink juice into a pot, and peeled the roasty peaches and cut them up into the juice and cooked them until everything was much darker and thicker and tasted more like peaches. Also I added lemon rind and lemon juice because that's what you always do with everything, and also a tiny drop of vanilla and almond extract and a sprinkle of cinnamon and there you have it the four spices of my baking most of the time. Then I made a regular sugar cookie dough which I flavored similarly and I lined the bottom of a glass baking dish with that and set it and the leftover crumbly bits (maybe a third to a half of the dough, actually) aside till I was ready to bake and while I was waiting I mixed a pint of ricotta with an egg and the usual suspects only a grated orange this time. Did I forget to mention I used sugar in these various parts? A wee bit more than I might have if K did not live here, actually. Then when I had the chicken and potatoes I was going to roast and the beets ready to go I turned on the oven to 380, don't ask why that number, and put the dough and the chicken adn the beets into the oven in their separate dishes and let them cook until the dough had integrity but was not brown. And then I put the ricotta in a layer over the dough and then the  cooked-down peaches (leaving most of the juice behind in the pot--there wasn't a huge amount anymore, but more than I wanted in this dish) and last the crumbly stuff and finally a sprinkle of more sugar because K. And then I baked it until it looked right. The cookie dough had turned brown top and bottom but had not burned, and the ricotta had cooked into a thing and the whole thing was pretty successful.

Meanwhile there was a scraping of ricotta stuff in the bowl yet, and the rest of the peach juice and a few pieces of peach, and I put the peach juice and pieces into the ricotta bowl with a handful of walnuts and that was my snack--"peach and walnut soup"--sounds very old country, doesn't it? Not telling whose old country it sounds like.

This, and watering the back yard, and the laundry, took me I swear to all that listens all dogdamned day. And I still haven't brought in all the laundry or cleaned the kitchen (tomorrow is another day). I did put all the finished food away in their separate containers. Tomorrow's lunch will be a soup made of the stuff from under the chicken (potatoes and onions) and some elderly broccoli and some of the chicken. Yesterday's lunch was semolina cooked like polenta with asiago cheese and then topped with sauteed yellow beans,parsley, and red bunching onions from the yard.

I did some snooping around online and it is apparently normal to be insomniac and exhausted for some weeks after knee surgery. The frustrating thing is that I am doing really well and I'm mentally ready to forge ahead into my new life with a long straight left leg but my tether is too short to have much in the way of adventures. And I thought I was low-energy before! Also, my readings indicate that the reason I am desperately hungry all the time is that I need a tremendous amount of food during this period. Well, all right. I'll eat piles of food if I have to, I guess.

It's Marvell season.

We've cleaned up the plums and apricots. The plum wine has gone from primary fermenter to secondary (that is, from a five-gallon plastic tub to a four-gallon glass carboy with an airlock). It's the color of raspberry sorbet, actually. In my kitchen right now are a large pot filled with windfall pippins: another large pot filled with fresh-froze blackberries from the good folks at Prevedelli Farm (about which more soon): and a really large bag filled with pears from some folks over on Chestnut Street who have been trying to give them away every day for a month (about which more soon). Tomorrow we are contracted to make low-sugar blackberry jam, canned pears in apple juice, pear leather, dried pear wafers, and apple-pear leftover juice jelly, one jar of which will have mint in it and one which will have rose geranium in it (like Grandma Emma used to make now and then).

So. Last year we ran out of jam. So the nice fellow wants to make sure we have every kind of jam we make this year. And for some reason we're making largeish batches of it. So the California Cooler (for those of us who haven't had to sit through this explanation before, it's a cupboard built into a lot of older California houses with ventilation to the outside. They're usually not big: ours isn't, it's about a foot wide, a foot deep, and starts at counter height and goes maybe four feet up. Make it four cubic feet, I guess. Anyway. They work on the principle that in a mild climate, air movement will keep staples cool enough for medium-term storage. I find it inconvenient to store stuff like flour in it, and I suspect it's not dry enough if you put anything really delicate, though I've had no trouble with it. We keep breakfast cereal on the bottom shelf and preserves all the way up. There's also three 24-oz. jars of dill pickles in there, and there will be, in a couple-few weeks, a very large number of jars of "chili sauce" which is an old, probably Midwestern, word for bumpy catsup, and also tomato chutney, both of which have become necessary staples in the house.

The Prevedelli farm: we got our strawberries at the Gizdich pick-yourself farm down at the southern end of Watsonville, sort of by Aromas. But when we called about blackberries we found out that they were done with all berries July 31st. I will tag this so we know next time. But we were undaunted and headed out to the Farmer's Market and asked the Prevedellis about bulk berries for jam and learned that we could get frozen "seconds" from them for $3.00 a pound. I guess what they do is when they're packing up berries for sale, they toss the squishy ones into a bucket and then put them up in bags in the freezer. What they do with these ordinarily is make jam. But they'd sell them to us. When we got down to their farm, which is way out in Corralitos at the north end of Watsonville, they were labelling the little cartons that sell in the grocery stores or the farmer's market. They seemed very nice. Years ago we bought apples and quinces from them a couple of times and it looked like grandma was doing the selling, and I now know that she was suffering from dementia -- in retrospect, that's what her struggling with the money was all about. I forgot to ask about quinces this time.

Then we drove around Corralitos, Freedom, and Pleasant Valley (not to be confused with Happy Valley) looking for a barn where the nice fellow used to buy fresh squeezed apple juice ("we have apples," I said, but not forcefully because our Pippins are a little tanniny when you juice them).

More about the pears:

So I walk down Chestnut street on my way home every day. There's a house which has been lifted up to make two stories where there were once one, and where the front yard is dominated by a plum tree and an angel's trumpet. For weeks now there has been a box or two of free fruit out front of their gate. Plums, and then pears. Yesterday I stopped to talk to an old friend who lives on Chestnut Street and is a relatively successful teacher (as opposed to me), and then I stopped at the free fruit house and thought: "dang, that thing with my friend's windfall peaches worked out so well, I think I'll do something with some of these free pears." Then I thought: "it's almost as much work to make a little as a lot, and these nice people keep offering their fruit to the neighborhood, why don't I make them an offer?" So I left them a note offering to dry and can some pears for them, and they called back and tonight I went over and showed them what I did with the peaches -- they have two small children, one of whom loved the peach leather -- and we agreed I would take their pears away and come back with a bunch of pear products. They thought there was something more they needed to do, but honestly, they already did their part.

They're nice young people: early thirties, I think, teachers, with the right books on their shelves (Rebel Girl, the biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, for example). And she's going to be working with another old friend who's a teacher, too.

Oh, those old friends who are teachers? I met the first-mentioned when we were doing the Early Childhood Education program at the community college, before we went to teacher school: and the second when we were both working at the freezer plant that is no longer there around the corner from where I now live, and were also both participating in the Neighborhood Coop (grocery buying club), and various political things. Also the first-mentioned friend's son went to school with Frank.

Who bought his ticket to Prague today. Priceline British Airways: it turned out that with Easy Jet, he couldn't get a guarantee on a return flight.

And he finished off the peach leather.