There was just enough of a breeze to keep us cool and comfortable. Six of us sat around the table on a backyard deck enjoying dinner together last night. Sipping white sangria and eating a meal made of stone fruits. Our hostess had thrown out a challenge for us. Each guest was to bring any dish that included stone fruit in the ingredient list.
My first thought was that we'd wind up with a bunch of desserts like peach crisp, plum tart, cherry pie. What is stone fruit? A stone fruit has a pit in the middle, surrounding a seed. Most well known stone fruits include peaches, plums, nectarines, cherries and apricots. But olives, almonds, mangoes and even dates are technically part of the stone fruit family.
Our entree turned out to be BLATs, sandwiches made of crispy bacon, fresh lettuce, slices of creamy avocado, thick rounds of tomato layered on bread that had been brushed with oil and toasted on just one side in the oven.
With no attempts to revise biblical history, I have concluded that some religious scholars may have erred. I simply do not believe that the fruit hanging from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden could have ever been an apple. In my humble opinion there is only one fruit that had the potential to misdirect Eve into morally unsound behavior.
If there’s one thing I learned about food while living in North Carolina, it’s that anything can be battered and fried: steak, okra, pickles. Heck, even butter, as Paula Deen, proved, can be battered and fried.
It was kind of cold yesterday, clearly not a day for lemonade. But I was thirsty. You know, that kind of thirst where you want something sweet, but not too sweet. And something sour, but not too sour. I felt like I could have drank a whole pitcher of this. Must have been those Dill Pickle chips the night before. Whoops!
Summer is coming to an end, and as I'm having trouble saying goodbye, I'm comforted by all the beautiful produce still available in the farmers' markets this late in the season. Last week I visited the Tucker Square Greenmarket at the corner of Columbus Avenue and 66th Street. They are a compact market with about six or eight small yet bounteous stands. I couldn't help but notice all the fruits: last-of-the-season white and yellow peaches and a few early varieties of apples, such as honey crisp. But what really caught my attention during this visit was a crate full of beautiful green and yellow zucchini. That's when I immediately decided on making this recipe for vegetable tian.