Thursday, August 27, 2009

Cooking experiment #1 - Peach Buttermilk Soup

Lately, I've been reading the cooking section in the New York Times. Lots of good stuff there. I decided that once a week, I'll try one of the recipes and see which ones are keepers.

First up at bat: Peach Buttermilk Soup. (http://bit.ly/2zkpsP).

Basic ingredients: Peaches, buttermilk, honey, nutmeg, cardamom (which is hideously expensive), and cinnamon. It looked like a very simple recipe so I decided to give it a try -- especially since I adore peaches.

Now, pitting peaches is supposed to be easy. Run a knife down the equator and then twist. My peaches were astonishingly uncooperative. Was it because I blanched and peeled the fruit first (but that's what the recipe said to do!)? In any case, the twisting became an exercise with how to smush fruit by hand. What a sticky mess! Afterwards, I rechecked the method for pitting peaches and yes, everything I found said to cut and twist. Ha! I'll believe it if I ever get it to work.

The rest of the recipe was essentially, dump the ingredients into a blender and puree. Of course, I didn't read the recipe carefully and put all of the ingredients in at the same time. But, I suspect it didn't make much of a difference (and was easier).

The end result was not as yummy as it looked in the picture. I'm thinking I needed more peaches (or less buttermilk :-) ). I expected a thicker consistency. Maybe I'll add more pureed peaches?

I was originally planning to bring the soup to a friend's gathering, but I wasn't totally thrilled with the result, so I ended up making a strawberry/yogurt soup instead.

For next week...not sure. I just saw a really interesting recipe for Baby Back ribs (which I've never cooked). Doesn't look too hard and doesn't require a day's worth of effort. Although it's not a NYTimes recipe, this one might get on the Experimentation list.

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