Peaches!

I was able to get in on an order of a flat of peaches. The noon lions club does a fundraiser selling peaches and pears from Colorado in the summer. Once they were in and ripe and ready I had to figure out what to do with all of them!
They came on Tuesday, we ate a bunch, but they were ready for being used by Thursday and Friday, so Thursday night I made a gluten free peach crisp to bring to work. I used a recipe from Cookie and Kate. I followed the recipe pretty closely except I put it in a 9x13 pan, so I scaled the recipe by 1.5 to fill the pan generously.

Saturday was a very busy cooking day. In between literally running to the farmers market I made Smitten Kitchen’s peach butter and I adapted the Original plum torte recipe from the New York Times to use peaches.

For the peach butter, I used the instant pot to cook the peaches. I cooked at HP for 8min with a NR. I used about a half cup of water, but it would be better with much less. After the peaches were cooked, I used the immersions blender to purée everything. Then I added the sugar and lemon juice and set the IP to sauté. This part took the longest time, and it may have been better to transfer to the stove because I kept having to turn the sauté off because it was splattering so much. The end result was good. I ended up with three pint jars and stuck two in the freezer. If I had canning equipment, I would try to can it so as to not take up freezer space. Maybe next summer.

For the torte, I made the batter as called for, but I grated some ginger in. I used about four large peaches cut in at least 1/8 wedges which I arranged skinned side up in a large outer circle and smaller inner circle around the pan. I grated a bit more ginger on top. I was happy how it turned out. I thought it tasted like some Kuchens I’ve had in Germany. Not too sweet, but the cake was nice and buttery. E didn’t like it because it wasn’t sweet enough. The recipe does call for sprinkling sugar on top depending upon the sweetness of the peaches but I opted to not add more sugar. Oh well, more for me.

I have about 5 peaches left with lots of possibilities, so stay tuned!