Love Me Some Peaches

Alex and I have been enjoying the products of our fresh peaches for a few days now and loving every peachy morsel.  First up: summer soup, grilled peaches, and pork chops smothered in peach grilling sauce.  Our townhouse complex delivers a monthly newsletter that includes a few seasonal recipes.  This month, the summer soup caught my eye, and I knew I wanted to make some as soon as I got some fresh peaches.  Simply mix about a quarter of a cantaloupe, one peach (no pit!), some lemon juice, a bit of white wine, and a dash of sugar in the blender, chill for an hour or two or three before serving, and garnish with raspberries.  I'm not usually a fan of cold soups, but this was refreshing and delicious.

 I put Alex to work cooking up the rest of that night's menu, and I must say he did a fabulous job.  If you've never had grilled peaches, I highly recommend them!  They may be my new favorite summer treat.  So easy.  Soooooo good.  I just made a little foil 'boat,' sliced up a couple of peaches, and handed it over to Alex who let it sit on the top rack of the grill while the pork chops finished up.  They were like having dessert at the same time as your dinner.  The grilling sauce on the pork chops turned out great as well.   A little spicier than I expected (keeping in mind that I am a WIMP when it comes to spice, so for the majority of people it would have been perfectly mild), but it worked out fine when accompanied by the cooler tastes of the soup and grilled peaches.

Truly a summer feast!

The next day I decided to attempt what we could consider my first real cooking experiment.  By that I mean, cooking something that was not labeled 'easy' in the cookbook nor that I had assisted my mom with in the past: peach cobbler!  I found the recipe from the dessert section of my Better Homes cookbook (featured in a previous blog post) and got to mixing.  It wasn't that complicated.  The most time consuming part was slicing the peaches (messy too!), and I was slightly stumped at the direction to cook the peaches until "bubbly and thickened."  How bubbly?  Boiling?  Why didn't it say boiling?  Would boiling ruin the mixture? And thickened?  Can I get a time frame here?  Or an estimated description of the desired consistency?  In case you didn't notice, I'm a bit detail oriented.  But I took a deep breath, kept stirring, guesstimated that it was 'thickened' enough, and..... Delicious!  If I made it again, I might add to the peach mixture to improve the dough-to-peach ratio.  But otherwise Alex and I were both very pleased.

 Thickening...

 Golden-browned to perfection!

And, of course, I served it with vanilla ice cream.  Because it's just not really peach cobbler otherwise.