"nectarines" news and stories

Got a bounty of peaches, plums and nectarines? Roast them for a delicious summer dessert.

Nectarine Galette. Photo: Smitten Kitchen.

We have a confession to make: We have a really hard time not turning Feast Your Eyes into a direct daily feed from Smitten Kitchen. Not only does the blog's author, Deb, constantly concoct an amazing array of seasonally diverse dishes over and over and over again, she manages to always take incredibly flattering photographs of her subjects.

Case in point: this nectarine galette -- a flat, round tart which Deb claims is "ridiculously easy to make." Making it look beautiful, however, is another story, yet somehow she manages to make that sound simple too: "A single pie crust, a brush of melted butter, a sprinkling of sugar and big wedges of peak-season fruit, in this case, arranged on a bed of ground almonds, baked until the edges are browned and the fruit is starting to caramelize."

Yeah... we'll just watch from over here -- with mouths watering, of course.

[Via Smitten Kitchen]

I am not a pie person. I enjoy eating them, but I find the process of making crust, rolling it out and getting it into the pan more bother than I can really deal with. However, I happily embrace all varieties of crisps and cobblers because they are hugely easy and are a wonderful way to use all that great summer fruit.

Yesterday, I made the easiest cobbler ever. It requires just one bowl, one measuring cup and a baking pan. Butter your favorite baking pan and set it aside. Pour five or six cups of blueberries into a medium-sized mixing bowl and add a few cubed nectarines (not required, but very tasty). Sprinkle cornstarch, sugar, cinnamon and grated nutmeg over fruit and squeeze half a lemon in. Stir to combine and pour into the baking pan. Use the same bowl to mix up the biscuit-style topping (recipe after the jump) and spoon it over the top.

I took it to a cookout last night and it was the perfect finish to a meal of hamburgers, potato salad, grilled corn and fresh, garden squash.

Among the many things I love about fruit crisps, one of my favorite features of this versatile dessert is that once you learn the basic technique of making one, you really never have to measure again. Saturday afternoon, I put together a blueberry-nectarine crisp to take to a potluck later in the evening. Back in August, I froze half the blueberries I picked, along with a quart of sliced nectarines. I plucked both bags out of the freezer, and after an hour of defrosting, tumbled their contents into a large bowl. I sprinkled them with some sugar (I didn't measure, but if I was forced to guess, I'd say it was a little more than half a cup), some cinnamon (a good shake), fresh nutmeg (a third of a meg) and a teaspoon of cornstarch (the only thing I measured, because you always want to err on the scant side with cornstarch). I tossed the fruit around with my fingers until coated and them spread them out in a large baking pan (it was a lot of fruit).

The fruit went into the oven at 350 degrees plain for the first fifteen minutes, as it was still a little frozen and I didn't want the topping to burn while the fruit was undercooked. While it baked, I whirred up topping in the food processor. In went about 2 cups of oats, 1 stick of butter (unsalted please), cane sugar (about a third of a cup), some cinnamon and a bit more nutmeg. This is my favorite way of making a crisp topping, because some of the oats get worked down into flour, while other bits remain intact. It comes together into a sort of dough that has a terrific texture and makes you think that what you're eating has some relationship to healthy eating. I toss in a couple of handfuls of chopped pecans just before spreading it out over the fruit. It baked for another 45 minutes, until the top was lightly browned and the fruit was bubbly and soft. Eaten with vanilla ice cream, it was one of the better treats I tasted in recent memory.

Last week when I went blueberry picking, I also brought home a quart of imperfect nectarines for $2. I could have gotten more perfectly formed specimen for twice the price, but I decided not to judge the fruit based on its outward appearance and went for a basket of marked and marred. It was a good buy, as they had incredible flavor. They were, however, also incredibly ripe and by yesterday were in need of some sort of speedy use or processing. Still overwhelmed by the zucchini muffins and lemon blueberry cake, I decided I couldn't handle another baked good in my apartment. I went the easy way and cut the remaining dozen of them into wedges and froze them on a cookie tray that I balanced precariously in my overstuffed freezer.

I now have a large bag of locally grown nectarine chunks in my freezer. I imagine I'll used them on a chilly, overcast day in November, when juicy summer fruit is a distant memory. On some very minor level, I feel a sense of satisfaction similar to that which I imagine women of another century often experienced, after a long day of canning the fruits of their kitchen gardens, so that they'd have fruits and veggies throughout the winter.