Devour this

Shake those peaches

 

I am so happy to have my first comment ever!  It's on my peaches and cream post, if you're interested.  Since Andrea's into peaches and I still am, too, here's a peek at another scrumdiddlyumptious summer peach dessert I made.  I took inspiration from this Lemon-Spice Bread Pudding with Sauteed Peaches, and used a little less butter, cream, and sugar, and a lot more vanilla bean.  I had these gorgeous white peaches from a weekend trip to Pennsylvania and they were as fragrant and flavorful as any peach I've ever bit into.  So I started with a beautiful crusty day-old loaf and hacked away with my pathetic serrated knife (anyone have recommendations for a good bread knife?).

After cubing the bread, I tossed with melted butter and baked until golden, toasty, and glistening.  You can imagine how good just those two ingredients with a little heat underneath smelled.  Unfortunately, I didn't capture a good image of the bread all brown and perfect.  It's still a little underdone here, but you get the drift...

Meanwhile, I steeped the milk and cream (mmm, cream..) with a big ol' vanilla bean and ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom.  I scraped the vanilla bean seeds as much as I could, but ended up plopping the whole bean in to steep.  It was a smart move.  After tossing the toasted bread cubes and egg mixture in to soak up, the smell entrenched in that bread was unbelievable.

After baking for another 50 minutes, the bread pudding and sauteed fruit made the whole house smell like a sunny meadow of butter and peaches.  Oh, summer love...

Taco Night and Next Day Nachos

Mexican food might be my favorite.  I could say that about any cuisine on a given night, though.  But it seems I crave Mexican most often.  Or Korean food.  Anyway, dating back to my elementary school days, taco night has been a culinary highlight in my life.  My dad and I would chop up icy iceberg lettuce and wobbly tomatoes and shred bright orange cheese and put it all into our special plastic taco tray with its separate compartments for each acoutrement.  I wish I could get my hands on another one of those.  Then I wouldn't have all the sinkful of dishes to wash afterwards...
But even hours of dishwashing can't diminish my excitement for taco night.  And while I don't brown that grocery store hamburger meat my dad and I loved, I do still pour that taco seasoning packet over the skillet of crumbled up vegan patties.

I've tried not using it, but I can't seem to combine the right mix of spices to create that zippy taco flavor.  I haven't yet allowed myself to look at the ingredients on the package to see how many unrecognizable elements are listed.  Ignorance is a blissful, taco-filled tummy.

Next Day Nachos are simply taco leftovers piled on top of thick corn tortilla chips and baked in the oven  -- chips get even crispier, cheese meltier, tomatoes juicier...gobs of salsa, sour cream, and guacamole and I'm once again transported to the land of Yum.

Just a spoonful of cream...

ILoveCream.  Its silky milky flavor and texture.  Its richness, soulfulness, and deliciousness.  I've taken to pouring it over everything -- my Summer Corn Pie, (burned) Peach Crumble, even tried it with my Trader Joe's O's (shhh...). 
That up there is my (burned) Peach Crumble, with heavy cream luxuriously resting on top and cheekily swimming around juicy peach goodness.  I used an America's Test Kitchen, or whatever the Cook's Illustrated affiliate is called, recipe for foolproof Peach Crumble (all of their recipes are supposedly foolproof, although I don't see how they can be so incognizant about the foolhardiness of our species) and while the recipe didn't fail, it did falter.  The peaches were succulent, sweet, and tart, but the crumble was crunchier and browner than I'd expected.  Did this have something to do with me watching The Flight of the Conchords while it was baking?  Hmmm...But the cream made it all better.  That cream has my back.