Year in Review: Cooking in North Carolina, Part 2

At the beginning of the week, Dan, Rob, and I went to the closest grocery store in order to stock up on cereal and sandwich provisions and the like for breakfasts and lunches. This grocery store happened to be inside a Super Walmart. When I went to select some fruit for snacks, I was disappointed to see that the peaches were from California. It just didn't make sense to me. When you are in one of the best peach-producing states in the country, at the peak of peach season, why are you shipping peaches from three thousand miles away? Yes, peaches are delicate, and they don't travel well, but it seems like madness to me to waste all that gasoline trucking things across a continent when better-tasting ones are growing an hour away. Okay, rant over.


Since the market wasn't until later in the week, for the first few days we reluctantly snacked on the California peaches, which were firm enough to survive the cross-country trip but frankly not that exciting. When Wednesday finally came around and we could purchase local peaches, they did not disappoint. They were twice the size of the California peaches with one hundred times the flavor. I am not exaggerating. All the peaches I've ever eaten in my life, added up, would not have the impact of a single bite of one of these peaches. It was like eating the sun.


So it was with great reluctance that Dan and I sliced up all these peaches to make gallettes. We briefly debated not serving dessert and eating all the peaches ourselves - they were that good! - but decided that would not be in the spirit of the week. With such excellent main ingredients, I wanted to keep the preparation as simple as possible, so we tossed the peaches with a small amount of brown sugar and a generous dose of cinnamon and piled them on top of roll-out pie crusts, casually folding over the edges to hold in the juices. We baked them at around 400 for twenty-five minutes or so: until the smell was unbearably good and the crusts were golden. We went with gallettes instead of regular pies for a few reasons. One, the open face shows off the beautiful color of the peaches. Two, with peaches that good, who wants a double pie crust? This kept the fruit-to-crust ratio high. And three, there were no pie pans in the rental, so this was also a practical decision that allowed us to use the pans on hand.

The gallettes were served a la mode. Sorry for the lousy final picture: we were in a rush to serve and eat these. I'm sure you can understand.

Year in Review: Cooking in North Carolina, Part 1

Last summer, Dan and I had the pleasure of spending four days on the beach in North Carolina with his extended family. They've been renting a beach house on the same little island every summer for years, and this was the first time since Dan and I got together that we'd been able to attend. There are a lot of traditions associated with the Holden Beach week, and one is that each night, a different couple cooks dinner for the entire family. Dan's dad Rob teamed up with us, and the men agreed to follow my lead. Now, at this point, we were several weeks in to our first CSA experience, and so I was excited to find out what North Carolina had to offer in terms of fresh, local produce. I used this search tool to find a farmer's market in the Holden Beach area.

The nearest market turned out to be in Southport, a short drive from Holden Beach. Southport, you may remember, is where we enjoyed a wonderful meal over the water at Provision Co. It's an idyllic village on the coast, and the farmer's market is held on Wednesday mornings at a park overlooking the harbor. It was a small market but the produce selection was more than satisfactory and a bluegrass band on the steps of the town hall enthusiastically provided the soundtrack throughout our visit.

When deciding what to cook, I originally thought of ribs, but it turns out Uncle David and Aunt Maureen always make the ribs. So then I thought maybe fajitas. Well, Scott and Melanie do tacos. So then I decided to stop making plans and just see what was available at the market. The first thing we bought, and the best, I think, was the amazing peas pictured above. Mississippi red crowder peas, according to the farmer who sold them to us.

The farmer recommended shelling the purple (drier) ones, slicing the green ones like green beans, steaming both lightly, and tossing them with any kind of oil. She also said a bit of bacon would bring out a natural smoky flavor. I followed her directions almost exactly, but instead of just oil, I used Newman's Own Balsamic Vinaigrette. These peas were amazing. I never thought I would enjoy peas so much. For me, a big bowl of these would have made a satisfying dinner on their own. I'm drooling just thinking about them.

But just peas wouldn't cut it, I knew. Nevertheless, at least we had our one local dish. Looking around the market, I found great vegetables for grilling and decided we would do kebabs as a main dish. We picked up big, fat, Vidalia onions, red and green peppers, yellow squash, and zucchini. Later we got chicken, mushrooms, and grape tomatoes from the grocery store and spent the afternoon chopping almost everything into large (1-1.5") chunks (leaving the mushrooms and tomatoes whole) and threading them on skewers. Kebabs look prettier when you mix everything up, but the reality is a mushroom and a chunk of zucchini and a piece of chicken all cook at different rates, so for the best taste, we threaded like with like so everything could cook how long it needed to, no more and no less. When it was all done, we dumped it all on a huge platter. I had planned to make Thai peanut sauce but when we found out there were a couple of people with peanut allergies, we switched that to an apricot-mustard dipping sauce (recipe below).

Part two, which covers the dessert we made, will be published tomorrow.


APRICOT-MUSTARD SAUCE
*learned from Alexia in college

2 tablespoons apricot jelly
1 tablespoon stone-ground mustard
1 cup plain yogurt (fat-free, lowfat, or whole milk is fine)

Put everything together in a small saucepan and stir over low heat until warm and blended.

That's it. It couldn't be easier, and it's very yummy. Adjust the jelly and mustard amounts to your taste. Serve over poached chicken, or grilled chicken or shrimp, or with grilled veggie kebabs. Whatever you can think of, it will probably taste good with this sauce.