Christiana Aretta writes a journal about food, photography, & toys.

Peaches are rotten little beasts. Perfectly ripe peaches are orgasmically sweet, ridiculously juicy things that I would eat off almost any man’s chest*. But that perfectly ripe window is maddeningly short – an unripe peach is a sugarless tease and an overripe peach is less peach than grey ooze, bent on returning to its primordial state.

So, when my neighbor brought some peaches over on Monday, I knew I had to act fast. And, by act fast, I mean leave them on the counter until today (Friday).

Brilliant Marketing Idea-Time: a peach timer. Kind of like an egg timer but maybe with some kind of probe to test peach ripeness. Ideally, it could send a Twitter DM just in case you didn’t happen to be home. Perhaps it could be called Tweach.

So I threw together a quick cobbler today. I used whole wheat flour and brown sugar for the crust so it looks a little browner in the pictures than it will if you use white flour and regular sugar (not because of some kind of brilliant art direction on my part, mind you – it’s just what I’ve got on hand, at the moment). The hardest part was slicing the peaches. It’s a dead easy late summer/early fall dessert recipe and highly customizable (add blueberries, blackberries, apples, orange slices, nuts, etc.).

Ingredients

• 5 large peaches
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 stick cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
• 1/4 cup cold water

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 425°F. Slice the peaches thinly in wedges and mix with 1/4 cup of the sugar, cinnamon, and lemon juice. Bake this mixture for 10 mins and then remove from the oven.
2. Mix together dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix in butter pieces with your hands until it has a similar texture to corn meal. Stir in water until just blended. Alternatively, you can mix the dry ingredients and the butter together in a food processor until cornmeal texture is achieved. Add the water and blend lightly.
3. Using two spoons, drop the batter in scattered spoonfuls over the semi-cooked peaches. Tempted though you may be to even out the mixture or go for an artsy Escher pattern, channel your inner Jackson Pollock and allow the batter to remain where it falls. It will spread and “fluff out” in the oven.
4. Bake battered peaches for 25 minutes (or until the crust is nice and golden brown and the peaches bubbly) and remove from the oven. Tastes best warm.

Recommended chests: Mark Dacascos, David Beckham, and that guy playing the werewolf in the new Twilight movie.. oh, and it must be a shaved chest. Nothing worse than trying to fish a peachskin-hairball out of your teeth…

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