Summer, We Hardly Knew Ye

This is a post I wrote last year, and it's eerie how closely it reflects this past week, from the cobbler to the weather. Anyway, hope you enjoy!

I hate to see summer leave. It's one of my favorite seasons, filled with freedom, and leisure, and all kinds of delights I wait all year to enjoy.

So I decided to celebrate the end of summer by making a peach cobbler, a treat I always associate with this time of year. I had some fresh peaches I'd bought at a favorite farm stand, and it seemed like a good idea to use them before they morphed into fruit leather. (My fridge is some kind of vampire, sucking out the essence of produce behind closed doors. You should see what it did to some oranges recently. They ended up looking like Yoda. Well, without the big ears. And if Yoda had used an orange-ish spray tan for a week straight.)

But I digress.

Cooking is not a simple thing for me. I may be a pantser when I write, but I don't wing it when it comes to food. It doesn't make sense to experiment with stuff that I plan to eat. There's not really an effective delete key with food either.

Which may be why I love cookbooks. Someone else has already done all the experimentation and come up with the final list of ingredients, in the right measured amounts, and then provided a roadmap that can be followed to a culinary HEA.

After a little online searching, I finally found a peach cobbler recipe that closely matched the ingredients I had on hand. I rejected one candidate because I wasn't about to make a trip to the store for self-rising flour. If I made it to the store, I could just buy ice cream and let the fridge do its dehydration thing on the peaches, and we'd both be sated.

Still, there was a little glitch. I didn't have 4 cups of peaches. I had 2. So I checked to see if I could easily cut the recipe in half, meaning I wouldn't have to do anything fancy with fractions. Whew. Yes, I could cut it in half, without scrambling my brain over a half of a half teaspoon.

Crisis averted.

Another potential issue was when I belatedly realized the peaches were supposed to be mixed in the same pan as the melted butter. The wording of that section of the recipe could use a revision/edit, for clarification purposes, which just goes to show that ALL writing can be improved.

While the oven did its part, I worked on the WIP, feeling productive and virtuous, knowing there was going to be a reward for all my efforts.

At last it was time to sample my culinary masterpiece, and I gobbled it up quickly, with only a smidge left over for today. (It was half a cobbler, if you remember.) It was delicious, evoking memories of summers past, while staving off dread of winters-to-come.

The funny thing is today is dark and dreary and cool and rainy -- as if Mother Nature wanted to reinforce in my mind that summer has been sent packing, thanks to my culinary endeavors, and its evil cousin winter will be swooping down to torment us before we're ready.

But before that happens, I'll have autumn, another one of my favorite seasons, as well as a wonderful array of apples to utilize in the kitchen.

You can bet I'll be rhapsodizing about my favorite apple cake pretty soon.

Unless it provokes winter into showing up early.

Comments

[Mae Clair]

Summer went by in a blink and I just KNOW winter is going to hang around for a long stare. So unfair!

I do enjoy October with its browning cornfields, colorful leaves and bright orange pumpkins. I have to trade my flip-flops for shoes, but at least I'm not digging out the winter boots yet. Ugh!

You have me hungry for cobbler and also wondering what's lurking behind my refrigerator door. I loved the comparison of Yoda with a spray tan and the oranges. I'm glad you settled on peaches instead :)

[Donna Cummings]

Mae, it DID go by in a blink, and my biggest complaint about winter is how it doesn't know when it's overstayed its welcome. LOL I love October too -- as well as your wonderful description of it (I always love your descriptions!)

I've got to take better care of the oranges, before I have a whole herd of Yodas taking over the fridge. LOL

[Okie Housewife]

Self-rising flour and online searches? My mind is clearly dirty. How are you?