Frozen Peaches: Not too Bad

Pop Quiz! What's the difference between a crisp and a cobbler?  A crisp has an oatmeal topping, and a cobbler has a more of a pastry top!  I've made apple crisp plenty of times (well, twice) before, but I hadn't thought about the difference between the two desserts until last weekend, when Nick made us Paula Deen's Peach Cobbler.  For this I got six peaches from the grocery store, and waited about two days for them to ripen.  Peaches are tricky because they're only delicious for about a day.  And I do feel confident in knowing when peaches are ripe.  So, I cut them open when I felt the time was right, and much to my dismay, they were disgusting.  Browning and mealy and...ugh.  Horrified, I concluded that peaches are not in season.  So, I picked up a couple bags of frozen peaches the next day. One stick of butter, and a 1.5 cups of self-rising flour (just all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt) later, we had a decent cobbler.  If anything, it was heavy on the crust.  Nick and I talked about  maybe next time shifting the pastry-fruit ratio to the healthier side with more fruit.  In addition to going lighter on the topping, we could use other fruits to make several different desserts this summer.  Perhaps even blackberry-peach...

Egg-in-a-Hole

Ahhhh, Springtime! What better time than this to reevaluate your New Years Resolutions and fry up the most delicious and nutritious symbol of life and rebirth?  An Egg-in-a-Hole is an egg cooked in the middle of a piece of toast, and it makes a lot of practical sense. If you're going to have a fried egg, you're going to make toast, and you're going to try to eat them together. With one hand on the fork, and one hand on the toast, it's a balancing act. (Unless you eat your food in sections, which is the wrong way to eat.)  And so, along comes the Egg-in-a-Hole, the most properly proportioned breakfast there is.  My mom used to make me an EiaH when I was little, and I realized recently that I don't necessarily need to be a child or have a child to have this self-contained breakfast in my life.

The first step is to cut out the hole in your slice of bread.  I remember my mom doing this with the rim of a water glass, though personally I just use a knife.  Next you heat up the frying pan, hit it with your nonstick agent of choice, and lay down the toast-ring. Then crack an egg in the center. Give it a few, then flip.  PRO TIP:  Don't overdo it.  Keep the center soft.  That's really the point of having the toast there, for the yolk.  You can give the center a light tap with your finger while it's in the frying pan to see how it's doing.  Oh, and you can cook the little toast-center in the side of the pan to have some bonus toast.

Zingerman's Balsamic Video Contest

What is the opposite of my cooking?  Zingerman's, of course!  I entered a contest on their website, for which I made a video about balsamic vinegar.  Check it out!

Fancy! Asparagus Risotto

So, I found a recipe for Asparagus Risotto in Food Network Magazine. I'm not the type of person to tear recipes out of magazines, but I recently had some good butternut squash risotto at Cafe Deluxe that put me in a risotto mood.  I already had asparagus in the fridge, so I went out and got a box or arborio rice.   I knew what arborio rice was because I used it once last year to make the world's worst rice pudding.  I may not be eating well, but at least I'm learning. Anyway, the risotto was interesting.  You basically make a broth—asparagus broth in this case—and slowly add it to the rice, stirring constantly.  It's just a lot of stirring. Other ingredients include asparagus (obviously), white wine, lemon juice and zest, butter, parmesan cheese, and thyme.  It turned out pretty good, actually.  The butter was relatively minimal, and I thought it tasted fattier than it actually was.  The only bad thing about this was eating it leftover the next day.  It just got sort of sticky.  So, of course, this was the last taste I had, deeming it a throwaway recipe.  Oh well!  At least I got the idea of risotto, and I don't think I'll be afraid to try a different one in the future.