Yes, it is January. But lately here in Southern California, you could almost believe it was summertime again. That and I currently have a large stock of photos I need to get through before I start sharing more recent endeavors. So here is my first from-scratch peach pie circa 4th of July weekend, 2011.
The last company I worked for used to give out food as holiday gifts. They regularly gave all one hundred-something employees turkeys for Thanksgiving and boxes of fruit for the 4th of July, along with other various food stuffs for important holidays. I didn't stick around long enough to find out what they gave out for Christmas.
I've never made a pie crust from start to finish but I had to do justice to those peaches. So I reached for my kitchen Bible- The New Best Recipe. Here's my crust coming together in my ancient hand-me-down food processor.
I really wanted to do this right so I even went for the classic lattice top. This peach pie ended up taking me two days since I did the crust and top a day ahead and storing them in the freezer. This made assembling the pie loads easier.
The filling ended up being a bit of a fiasco. The peaches were not very ripe and despite several days of sitting them in a covered bowl with the ripest peach I could find, I ended up having to deal with working with hard peaches. I massacred those peaches, boy. I don't know if you've ever tried to remove the pit of an unripened peach but I do not suggest you try it. Lots of new and creative curses were invented that day. But I persevered.
The
before and
after pictures. My oven is still a total mystery to me, so there were a few edges that were a little deeper golden brown than I had intended. Despite that, the reaction was undeniably positive. We were even fortunate enough to be able to pair it with home-made ice cream!
Coming up, I'll share my first commissioned baking project. Next time:
Baby bottle sugar cookies.
