tag: peach

Can I be honest with you, reader? I think I might have overdone it a bit last week.

I was shooting at some of my favorite bars in Paris. Which meant, of course, that I was drinking a lot of cocktails. How could I not? Expertly mixed by charming barkeeps with far more sophisticated palates than mine, bourbon and rye and gin was coursing through my veins nightly.

Still, there is something to be said for a simple, seasonal drink that you can make at home without the assistance of an expert — and this one is sneaking it at juuust the very end of peach season.

With a little egg white for that foamy cap, and some basil for fresh herbiness, this cocktail begs to be paired with a hearty brunch.

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Posted in: drinks | Tags: cocktail, cocktail recipe, drink, gin, gin cocktail, gin peach fizz, peach, peach cocktail, recipe | 1 COMMENT

As you may have surmised, I went to a lot of restaurants while I was in Paris. Something I might have failed to mention is that, on occasion, I bought the cookbooks from those restaurants.

Now that I’ve been back in LA for several weeks, I’ve gotten over the fun of eating everything that I missed while I was abroad (In-n-Out! hoppy beer!) and am now starting to miss my favorite restaurants in Paris.  So I thought, why not try to reproduce some of these dishes at home?

Let’s start with a simple one from Frenchie. A play on the traditional caprese, this salad replaces tomatoes with roughly-torn ripe summer peaches and counterpoints them with savory, smoky mozzarella.

Then? You drizzle on lots of the good stuff.

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Posted in: salads | Tags: caprese, cheese, food, frenchie, frenchie cookbook, fruit, fruit salad, greg marchand, gregory marchand, La cuisine du Frenchie at home, mozzarella, paris at home, peach, peach caprese, recipe, salad, smoked mozzarella, summer | 4 COMMENTS

Right now, in my life, there are peaches everywhere.

There is also stale bread in my life, always and forever.

I have a love/hate relationship with stale bread. There’s so much to do with it! Breadcrumbs! Bread soup! Croutons! But it’s just that… there’s this never-ending supply. We get a baguette every morning and finish about half of it. Consequently, there are usually two or three half-baguettes in various stages of staleness strewn about my kitchen, making me feel guilty and wasteful if I don’t think of something to do with them. A girl only needs so many containers of bread crumbs in her life.

Same thing with peaches, sort of. They’re so cheap and abundant and beautifully fragrant at the greenmarket that I buy way too many, then only eat half. The rest sit there in my fruit basket, looking depleted and sad and disappointed in me, there among the lemons and apples.

So, what to do with ingredients that are past their best? Bake them in eggs and cream, of course. Then smother them in bourbon.

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Posted in: cooking, desserts | Tags: bourbon, bread pudding, cream sauce, dessert, old peaches, peach, peach bread pudding, peaches, stale bread, whiskey | 5 COMMENTS