Peaches & Yogurt Dessert
What do you do with wrinkly peaches? You know that thing when you look in the fruit bowl - if you are indeed grown up enough to have a fruit bowl - and there is a motley collection of baggy peaches, the odd plum donated from a neighbour’s tree, and a bright and perky orange, totally out of season - but what the heck, so are the lemons if it comes to that.
Yesterday the peaches were perky too; now they are saggy sorry excuses for stone fruit, and the plums need a good talking to as well. If you don’t have a fruit bowl, the baggy objects are likely to be even more dejected in half squashed plastic punnet, the guilt from buying fruit in a single-use plastic container outweighed by the price and the promise of ‘ripen at home’ that dazzled you in the supermarket, until you realise it is all about to be thrown away as it rots before your eyes.
There is a solution to this problem. Here it is:
Ingredients:
5 peaches
4 plums
1 tsp of sugar
1 tsp of vanilla syrup
Method:
Take said sorry fruits, let’s say you have 5 peaches and 4 plums for argument’s sake, and peel them. At least peel them if you want to. I dislike cooked peel of any kind except potato. Since we are indeed going to cook the peaches, I’m suggesting doing it my way. But you don’t have to if wrinkly peach skin doesn’t offend you.
You can peel them one of two ways. Either slowly and methodically just as they are, using a sharp knife and your thumb to grab on to the skin and pulling it away gently from the flesh. Or you can put the fruit in a heat resistant bowl and pour boiling water over them, leave from about 1 minute then pour the water away. This will help loosen the skin and make the process bit easier. Either way, the peeling process is a satisfying meditation and an exercise in the power of your will over the temptation to lick your fingers constantly.
Once the skin is removed, cut the fruits into chunks of any size you like - I favour the classic peach wedge that you find in shop-bought cans of peaches. Canned peaches were the only way we had them when I was a child, and then rarely - in the depths of the Yorkshire countryside we knew no different. We did have a plum tree though, with big juicy fruits in the summer that you had to fight with the wasps to get at. The wasps won quite a lot of the time.
Put all the fruit chunks into a pan, any pan. Add two good size teaspoons of honey, 1 teaspoon of sugar, a level teaspoon of vanilla syrup, or a few drops of essence. If you are lucky enough to have lovely vanilla pods in your larder (kudos for extra grown-up larder by the way), then split one down the middle and add that to the fruit instead.
Add a couple of tablespoons of water and heat to bubbling for about 5 minutes, then turn the heat to a simmer and continue to hubble bubble for about 10-15 minutes. If it is drying up, add a little more water - you want to end up with a good amount of lovely sticky juice at the end.
You could cook the fruit for longer, so it becomes mushy, and that would be nice too. Still, I prefer it only just cooked, at which point take it off the heat and transfer to a container with a lid that can be put in the fridge when it’s cooled. If you haven’t eaten it all by then. This isn’t jam so will only keep a week or so chilled. It’s delicious with plain yoghurt, kefir in my case today because it’s suitable for the tum, or with granola, porridge, accidentally crumbly flapjacks and vanilla ice cream or just on its own. So good, so summery, you’ll never look a baggy old peach the same way again.
For a slightly more sophisticated version, you could add a little bit of pudding wine or brandy and serve as dessert at a dinner party, layered in small glasses - peaches on the bottom, then yoghurt or whipped cream, topped with a sprinkling of crumbled flapjack. Nigella would be proud!
TOP TIP: You can use the hot water method with tomatoes as well, making a little nick in each one before you add the water to further help the easing off the skin.
Written by Liz Haughton
Bristol resident for twenty five years, Liz ran the Folk House Cafe in Bristol for 13 and half years, adding Spike Island Cafe in along the way, until August 2019. Liz is currently organising a series of Slow Creative Retreats (www.slowretreats.co.uk) and encouraging nursery school kids to play with their food. Liz is a cook, writer, painter and general dabbler in all things creative.