Peachy

Reader, bear with me. This is about peaches again, can you stand it? Plums this time too.

I've written rhapsodies about the peach guy from Colorado who sells big juicy peaches in town all summer. But this bowl of peaches and plums is from a friend in the neighborhood who has fruit trees in her courtyard that are over producing.

When she offered to give me some fruits from her tree, I was skeptical -- homegrown fruit is never the quality that comes from professional orchards and I already have a love affair with the peach guy from Colorado. I appreciated her generosity and told her I'd take a half dozen.

She dropped off a bag of 50 or more small, rosy golden jewels, threw in some blue plums from her plum tree too. 

I put some together in a bowl and you can see the peaches are small, about the size of the plums. While the peach guy sells giant globes of very juicy soft peaches, these are firm little things and I feared they might be mealy or hard.

They were not. They are delightfully smooth and slippery inside, just the right texture for slicing and with a mild, peachy taste. Not perfumey as some peaches can be and not dripping like the peach guy's. These are perfect little peaches.

What to do with dozens of them? Besides eating them fresh, sliced up on my cereal and over ice cream? I baked.

In the years we have been living here in New Mexico, I have lamented how much I miss New England apples and blueberries. I miss them a lot.

But the mountain west is a surprisingly good climate for stone fruits. Apricots, cherries, plums and peaches are spectacular here. The trees thrive. The Navajo were orchardists and the 300 peach trees growing at the bottom of Canyon de Chelly were their pride, proudly shared with the conquistadors who arrived (and ultimately destroyed the orchards in conflicts that followed.)

Of course there are good years and bad years for fruit crops, given our unpredictable weather. But when it's a good year it's really peachy (sorry).

Use a standard pie crust

In a bowl combine 1/2 cup sugar, 2 Tablespoons flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 2 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter. 

Use your fingers to pinch the butter into the dry ingredients until crumbly.

Add 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla, or almond extract if you prefer. Sprinkle cinnamon in, but not too much.

Slice up as many peaches as your neighbor gives you, arranging them in the pie crust in concentric overlapping circles. Sprinkle the pebbly butter mixture over the top. (I did not peel these peaches, the skin was thin.)

Bake for 35 minutes at 425 degrees in a 9 inch pan, maybe longer in a bigger pie plate. Tent foil over the pan to prevent burning. My crust burned anyway.