Peach Butter

A late night canning session yielded two pints of thick, golden peach butter. The farmer up the road has a peach orchard that has a good yield every other year. This is an orchard of very cold-hardy peaches, with tall thin cedars planted as a wind break around it. Even with all these precautions, they still lost trees this past winter. It's a loss that our whole neighborhood feels.

Having fresh, local peaches is a luxury I can't properly explain to anyone who anyone who has the luck to live in the southern states near peach orchards. Anyone who has bitten into a warm fresh peach and had the juice burst down their chin falls in love. Peaches are such a warm weather commodity, and there isn't a whole lot of warm weather here in Western Maine.

When I was a little girl in Texas, my Pa-Paw would take us to the peach orchard to pick up a bushel basket of peaches. Ma-Maw would freeze them with sugar and fruit preserve and store them in her chest freezer for her sugar-crazed grandkids to eat. My Sister loved them especially. I hope that I can give sweet memories of fresh peaches to Miss Critterpants.

Gone Fishin'

We all went fishing on Wednesday night. Our neighbors took us out in their boat on Great Moose Lake for a little fishing. We were after white perch, which are overly abundant and don't have a limit set on them.

There are so many perch, all you have to do is drop a line in the water with something anything on a hook and you can catch one. In two hours, with three and a half people fishing, about two hundred fish were caught. They are kind of small and bone-y, but they are really delicious. My Guy caught and gutted almost eighty perch and we had a feast on Thursday.

I finally got over my fear of the deep fryer, and apparently I am some kind of deep-frying savant. Or beginner's luck. The fish came out perfectly done and super crispy in its beer battered goodness.

The beer batter recipe came from the 1976 "A Texas Hill Country Cookbook" that came from My MaMaw by way of My Mom and it is goooooooooood.

recipe as follows:

Beer Batter for Deep-frying Fish

1 12-ounce can of light beer (I used Miller High Life)
1 cup sifted flour (I didn't sift, and used about a cup and a quarter)

1 Tbsp salt

1Tbsp paprika (I didn't have any paprika, so a generous shake of chipotle)

now, I took the filets and made sure they were as dry as possible, dredged them in a mix of flour, salt and garlic powder, then dunked them in the beer batter. fried at 400 degrees until done.

then took the frying even further and cooked up some dill pickle slices. they were kind of weird, but anything fried flavor is good.