FRESH peaches and strawberries. I am so ready for summer produce! Our grocery chain had peaches for sale, and as I walked by their scent wafted up at me. I couldn’t resist touching them, and discovered that they weren’t rock hard! I bought three or four, and then bought more the next time I was in the store. I’ve been eating peaches and strawberries at breakfast and dinner. I shared them with my sister, Frankie, of Just My Opinion, while she was visiting this week. YUM!!
When I was in my twenties, I lived in the far northwest suburbs of Chicago. The week after I was married, my parents and youngest sister moved to Table Rock Lake in Missouri. My father would make occasional trips up this way for business, and I asked him to bring me a bushel of peaches from one of the orchards in his area.
He made the trip, and had to wait a day until I could drive down to Joliet to meet him. I was rather surprised to find that half the bushel of peaches was gone! They were so ripe when he started out that they began to bruise before he got into Illinois, and waste no-want not kind of guy that he was, he pared away the bruised spots with his pocket knife and ate the rest. I found peaches on every surface toward the end of the room near the air conditioner. He’d really tried to get them to last for me, but FRESH peaches are fragile. I hope to make a simplified peach “pie” that was featured on the cover of Midwest Living last summer. I saved the color picture because it was so enticing.
I visit the L.A.Times Crossword Corner blog almost every day. We were talking about zucchini for some reason. It’s likely it was puzzle-related to start, but you never know what prompts some of the discussion. At any rate, I thanked the posters for reminding me that I needed to go out and harvest my zucchini, that there was a baseball bat sized one waiting for me. That prompted a flood of recipes to use up zucchini. I think almost everyone has a zucchini bread recipe in their files. Someone posted a link to Simply Recipes to the chocolate zucchini cake. I’ll be making that cake tomorrow! I wasn’t kidding about the big zucchini. It’s got to be about a foot long and my hand won’t close around the width. I may make some zucchini bread while I’m at it. I’ll be caring for Elegante Mother this weekend, so I’ll take some of both to her.
It’s that time of year. I suspect that I’ll have a lot to say about fresh produce in the coming months. Why would anyone eat a frozen dinner when they could have tuna salad with fresh dill on a tomato warm from your garden?