Peach Festival

Whoop, whoop! We’re having a peach festival! Actually, this festival is just at our house.

That’s because I recently acquired this 25 lb. box of peaches.

I got them from The Peach Truck. They are delicious. I saw an ad for The Peach Truck a while back, and, as you’ll recall, my family is crazy about fruit. If you don’t remember, click this link and skip down to the picture of the fruit that was in our house one day when the whole family was reminding me that we needed more fruit. Anyway, at the time I fell prey to this online ad, Father’s Day was coming up, and delicious peaches seemed like a lovely Father’s Day treat. And then it turned out that this situation is more like waiting for your favorite band to go on a world tour: you just have to drop everything and show up when they come to you. Which was okay, except then, to make things a bit of a bummer, the Peach Truck showed up in town two days before Cute W and J left town to visit Grandma and Grandpa. So the timing was poor, but M and I have rallied.

When I purchased my box, I paid $45 for a 25 lb. box of peaches and I was given a date, time and location to show up and pick up the box. Incidentally, when got to the tractor supply place in Guilderland, there were so many peach enthusiasts that a cop was directing traffic into the parking lot, but the pick up was quick and efficient. Now, was it a good deal? I’d say mostly yes. In the same week, Hannaford and Price Chopper peaches cost between $1 and $2 per pound. Now, you might think that my peaches should have been cheaper because I was buying in bulk, or that they might have been more expensive because they’re specialty items trucked straight from the farm to me. I will tell you that it’s the best deal for these peaches you’re going to get. Now that the truck tour has moved on, prices have gone up, and you can order home delivery of 26 peaches for $79. I got way more than 26 peaches and I paid way less. But honestly, I can see how this is an excellent business model, because when you get 25 pounds of peaches, you share with your neighbors, and then your neighbors ask where you got them, and they are going to want more and they won’t want to wait ’til next year. Literally, my neighbors asked me how I could hook them up with the Peach Truck.

Anyway, with only half our household at home, I’ve been eating a lot of peaches, and I’ve also been trying peach recipes. I told M that I was taking the week off from cooking dinner, which I (mostly) have, but some of that energy has been going into the Peach Festival. First, I am a huge, huge fan of this Quinoa-Arugula Bowl With Peaches and Avocado. Part of me is a little sorry, because the Cooking Light website has become so annoying, so I don’t want to send you there, but it is delicious. SO good. Don’t forget that there is a trick to making quinoa yummier if you currently don’t love it. Also, I happened to have Cotija cheese when I found this recipe, but I bet it would also be good with feta. I also didn’t have the sherry vinegar, so I used white wine vinegar. But it was very, very delightful. And so good for you, too!

I also grilled some peaches. These were easy and tasty, but my efforts were not nearly as pretty as the many, many gorgeous beauties with grill marks that you will find if you Google grilled peaches. And if you do Google them, you’ll find a bunch of basic recipes that pretty much come down to: cut them in half, grill for 5 to 8 minutes, throw something on top if you’d like. Done.

I also made this Healthy Peach Frozen Yogurt, which was tasty and more photogenic than the grilled peaches.

It did suffer a bit from that peril of frozen delights, which is that by the time it’s ready, it’s maybe a bit too soft, and then if you put leftovers in the freezer, it freezes a bit too hard. But I think that when we’re ready to eat it, we can leave it out on the counter to soften, and it will be just right again. I’m not going to eat it now, of course, because it will keep just fine in the freezer, and I still have plenty of peaches ripening on my counter as we speak! I’ve got to focus on the fresh ones!

I was definitely worried that we wouldn’t be able to use all of our peaches, so I’ve also dried a bunch of them.

I love-love-love dried fruit, and these are so good that if I allowed myself to, I would definitely be able to scarf down 10 peaches’ worth of peach chips in one sitting. But obviously that would be a terrible idea, and again, I am still focusing on the fresh peaches. I am a huge fan of this food dehydrator. I didn’t even bother to peel these peaches — I just sliced them and put them on the racks. I use the food dehydrator to make our own “sundried” tomatoes, and it’s also awesome for doing something with fruit that I don’t want to waste and I don’t want to freeze. For example, we have a strawberry patch that gifted us with so many strawberries that we couldn’t possibly keep up with them, especially since they were not super-sweet and they spoil very quickly. But when I cut them and dried them, they became irresistible and disappeared quickly. And yes, I’ve made potato chips and carrot chips and kale chips, though I haven’t done so lately. Hmm, I should probably try that again. But not ’til after I get through my personal Peach Festival.

If you are wondering why I am skipping peach jam and peach tarts, I just don’t like to add too much extra sugariness on top of my fruit. And these peaches are plenty sweet. For the record, I’d order these peaches again. And if we’d had all four family members in town, I think we could go through them pretty easily. But as I said, my family are really fruit fanatics.