Peach and Ginger Brown Sugar Shortcakes

30 Jul

You have to eat this. No, really. This might be the best dessert I’ve had all summer, and, as you may have noticed, I tend to eat a lot of desserts.

I can’t really say what the secret to this dessert is, because it seems to me that this shortcake’s power lies in the collective virtue of several influences. The brown sugar in the shortcake plays wonderfully off of the unexpected notes of the ginger in each bite. The crisp edges of each shortcake, with their buttery flavor and texture, are made more notable by the exquisitely ripe peaches, all of which are touched with just a dollop of unsweetened whipped cream. Because the only thing that gets sweetened in this dessert is the shortcake pastry itself, the sweet ripeness of the peaches, along with the smooth mellowness of the cream, are really allowed to stand out. It’s ginger and brown sugar. It’s peaches and cream. It’s just so good.

It’s like a symphony, really. A decadent, summery symphony that beckons you to come closer, have a taste, then another taste…and then, perhaps, maybe, a few more tastes. So many that you just might, along with some assistance from an eager, peach-loving child, end up tasting an entire shortcake before dinner, which then means that, after dinner, when everyone else is having a bit of shortcake, you might be lucky enough to encounter even more shortcake. Not that anyone has to know about the first one. If you promise not to tell, I promise to give you some shortcake.

Last Year: Sour Cherry Pie

Peach and Ginger Brown Sugar Shortcakes Recipe

I was curious to see if peeled peaches would fare better in this dessert over peaches that still had their skins, so I peeled half of the peaches (which, if your peaches are extremely ripe, as they should be, will be a very simple and painless task—the skins should effectively just slip right off once the peaches are sliced) and left the rest of the peaches with their skins. The result? Both the peeled and non-peeled peaches tasted great, and I actually liked the look of a combination of the two. That said, if you don’t want to peel your peaches, you certainly don’t have to. The dessert will still taste wonderful.

2 ½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

¼ cup dark brown sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder

½ teaspoon sea salt

8 tablespoons (1 stick) cold unsalted butter, cut into small squares

2/3 cup cold buttermilk

¼ cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

6 or 7 very large, extremely ripe peaches

1 cup whipping cream

1 or 2 drops pure vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

In a large bowl, combine flour, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt, then whisk together. Add the butter and, using a pastry cutter or two knives, cut the butter into the flour mixture until the end result resembles coarse crumbs with a few pea-sized chunks of butter here and there. Stir in the buttermilk, then the ginger, and incorporate everything as much as possible.

Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured counter. Gently knead the dough a couple of times to bring together any stray shaggy bits or dry patches, then pat the dough into a 9-inch by 6-inch rectangle. Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into 8 squares. Place each square on the prepared baking sheet, gently rounding the corners of each shortcake as you space them apart.

Bake the shortcakes in the center of the oven for 12-14 minutes, until the bottoms are well browned and the edges of each shortcake have turned a dark golden brown. Remove shortcakes to a wire rack to cool completely.

While the shortcakes are baking, pit the peaches and slice them into medium-thin slices. Toss all of the peach slices together in a bowl, then refrigerate until you are ready to assemble your shortcakes. Right before you want to serve your shortcakes, whip the cream with the drops of vanilla.

To assemble the shortcakes, slice the top 1/3 off of a shortcake. Layer a large amount of peach slices over the bottom 2/3 of the shortcake. Top the peaches with a dollop of whipped cream, then gently place the top 1/3 of the shortcake over the cream.

Makes 8 peach shortcakes.

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Best Food to Pack on a Road Trip

23 Jul

Many people may find this to be an admission of pure insanity, but I like a long road trip. That’s not the insane part, though. I like a long road trip with my kid.

Perhaps it is because, for the first year or so of his life, my kid hated riding in the car. Most people I know swore by putting their baby in his or her car seat and driving around in order to silence their kid’s fussing or screaming, but my kid had the exact opposite reaction to riding in a car. Whereas he would start out a car journey in complete calmness, by about 30 seconds in he would start fussing, then crying, then screaming in total agony. The whole time, I might add. The screaming wouldn’t stop until the journey came to a stop. Because of this, my husband and I, for the first year of our kid’s life, never went anywhere in the car. The only traveling our kid did was via a stroller or Baby Bjorn. Since it was impossible to make trips to the coast or the mountains via stroller, I think we’re still, all these years later, making up for lost trips. Because now? My kid is a champion road-tripper.

We’ve become pretty adept at it, too. We’ve learned which east and west-bound routes serve us best, which rest stops along I-5 have the most pleasant surroundings (I highly recommend the Randolph C. Collier Rest Area in Northern California for both lovely scenery and unsurpassed cleanliness), and most importantly, what types of foods to pack that will bring us not only energy, but also pleasure.

I try to pack a good variety of foods for our trips, and I try to arrange them into two categories: meals and snacks. Depending on how long our road trip will be, I might end up packing two meals and a handful of snacks, or sometimes just a good amount of snack foods.

For meals, I find it difficult to go wrong with a nice sandwich, packed with crisp vegetables and a nice slip of meat or cheese (or both). For our recent road trip to Eastern Oregon, I packed individual sandwiches on little ciabatta rolls (in the past, I have made these black bread rolls for sandwiches and, man, were they good). Much like with this stuffed picnic sandwich (which is also a great item to pack on a road trip), I like to tear a bunch of the bready middle out of the center of each roll, allowing for a tidier nest in which to nestle in your chosen sandwich fillings. If you are going to be forced to actually eat your meal in the car while driving, this also makes for a much tighter sandwich packet that is easier to contain. For the sake of ease, you can make make your sandwiches the night before you leave, wrap them up, then just toss them into a small cooler on the morning of your trip.

I have also had good success rolling some of these Indian turkey burgers into a tortilla with chunks of cucumber and strips of lettuce. If you are horrified by the idea of mixing Indian food with a tortilla, just close your eyes (but not if you are driving) and pretend that the tortilla is a chapati and you’ll be fine.

For a simpler spread, sometimes I just fill one bag with a selection of crackers, another with squares of sharp cheddar, and call it good. These are great with sliced vegetables while picnicking, or, if you’re traveling with other people, they can be stacked up and handed to you as you drive. For a different riff on this idea, try slices of sharp cheddar piled on top of slices of this no-knead apple bread, or perhaps this no-knead flatbread.

For snacks, I tend to lean heavily in the direction of things that are satisfying without being heavy or sweet. These granola bars are a huge hit on road trips. Lately I have taken to baking the granola bars in a 9” by 13” pan and baking them for a slightly shorter amount of time. This makes for a crisper, flatter granola bar that is great for a little snack while hiking or on the road.

I also like to make my own trail mix out of a cup each of roasted almonds and pecans, sometimes pumpkin seeds, and then a handful of various dried fruits (dried cherries, dried cranberries, and chopped up dried apricots are all good additions). I used to also add a handful of dark chocolate chips, but they tended to get a little messy after being tossed around in a warm car (also, my kid would pick out all the chocolate chips and then launch into a chocolate-fueled frenzy, which is something you want to avoid while trapped in a moving vehicle).

Fruits and vegetables are also important snacks. I have learned that the less juicy the fruit, the better. This means no peaches, nectarines, pineapple slices, or watermelon. Better choices can be found in grapes, blueberries, raspberries, sliced apples, or even sliced peaches and nectarines (so long as they can be eaten without being dropped because, oh, man, how unpleasant is it to accidentally sit on a peach slice in a hot car?). Basically, choose fruits that are unencumbered by pits or seeds, since you don’t want to have to deal with those things while driving.

If you don’t have room for fruit, or you don’t want to deal with it, you can always opt for a nice selection of fruit leather.

As for vegetables, baby carrots are standard for our trips, but blanched green beans are another crisp, delightful option. Sliced bell peppers and sliced cucumbers are also nice to have on hand, and they pair wonderfully with the aforementioned cheese and crackers.

And, because I am me, I can’t have a road trip without a little treat. These Mexican chocolate zucchini muffins are a delightful thing to have on hand, and their low sugar content won’t make you feel crazy while you sit in a car for several hours after eating them. We also took this tangerine zucchini bread on a recent trip, and it was great to have on hand for a little something sweet, yet not cloyingly so. The same goes for these carrot muffins, another pleasing, not-to-sweet treat.

We’re gearing up to take our annual summer trip to San Francisco, and you can bet that a wide variety of these foods will be coming along with us. Not to hammer in my previous mention of suspected insanity, but the drive is 12 hours long—each way—so the food we pack can make or break our enjoyment of the drive. It also helps that, without fail, we always hit a Dairy Queen as a special treat while driving through the hottest parts of the state. A small dipped cone (vanilla ice cream, chocolate dip) can perform near-magical  wonders in the heat.

Last Year: Grilled Peaches and Sausages with Almond Herb Bulgur

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Tangerine Zucchini Bread

19 Jul

Our refrigerator is broken. This is certainly not a good thing, but it is, to be totally glass-half-full about it, certainly an interesting thing. Why? Because while perusing the contents of our warm refrigerator, I came across some long forgotten items that had been, over time, shuffled towards the back regions, never to be seen until disaster struck and I was forced to reckon with them.

But that’s all right! Because if one should make lemonade from lemons, one should also make delicious, moist, toothsome tangerine zucchini bread from freshly picked zucchini and long-lost tangerine marmalade.

The original recipe for this bread called for standard orange marmalade, but I think this tangerine boost really takes the bread over the top. In fact, if you can locate (or, if you are the marmalade-making type, conjure up on your own) different types of marmalade, like mandarin orange, satsumas, or any other citrus fruit, I’d bet this bread would take to it nicely. Even apricot jam, which the original recipe lists as a substitute for marmalade, would be a great addition.

I hate to cut this short, but the contents of the refrigerator and freezer are currently sitting in two coolers that are rapidly becoming no-so-cool, and I now have to figure out what I am going to make with a dozen eggs, half a head of cauliflower, two types of chutney, five bottles of hot sauce, three bunches of lettuce, a bunch of carrots, half an orange bell pepper, a jar of Dijon mustard, four jars of jam, a jar of fish sauce, a huge bottle of soy sauce, and some organic ketchup. And that’s just about half of the stuff from the refrigerator, never mind the freezer. Wish me luck.

Last Year: Highlights from a 1985 copy of Joy of Cooking, in which we learn how to cook muskrat and raccoon

Tangerine Zucchini Bread Recipe

Adapted from Tartine

As usual, I reduced the amount of both sugar and oil in this recipe. The original recipe called for almost a full cup of sugar total (¾ cup in the bread, plus 2 tablespoons sprinkled on top), but I cut the sugar content down to only 1/3 cup, swapped the granulated sugar for light brown sugar, and omitted the dusting of sugar on top. The result is just perfect, and with the marmalade and shredded zucchini to round things out, so moist and flavorful, it’s impossible to detect any loss of either sugar or oil.

1 ¾ cups plus 2 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 large eggs, at room temperature

½ cup vegetable oil

1/3 cup light brown sugar

½ cup tangerine marmalade (or any other marmalade of your choice)

2 ½ cups grated, fresh zucchini, lightly squeezed to remove some of the excess juice

½ teaspoon sea salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Lightly grease and flour the bottom and sides of a 9” by 5” loaf pan, knocking out any excess flour.

Combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and cinnamon in a sifter, then set aside on top of a sheet of wax paper or parchment paper.

In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, oil, sugar, and marmalade until combined. Add the zucchini and salt, and whisk to combine. Scrape down the sides of the bowl. Sift the flour mixture mixture directly into the bowl containing the egg and zucchini mixture. Fold the flour into the zucchini mixture until just combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan, smoothing the top as much as possible. Bake in the center of the oven until a cake tester comes out clean, about 60 to 65 minutes. Allow to cool in the pan for about 20 minutes, then invert on to a wire rack, turn right side up, and allow to cool completely.

Serve at room temperature.

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