The Student Surpases the Teacher

There comes the realization in a parent’s life that the child is starting to connect the dots. The big lessons and the little lessons that you’ve taught over the many, many, many years start to lose some of their randomness in the child’s minds and becomes a cohesive mass of knowledge. And then they use that newly realized knowledge and perform beyond what you perceived their capabilities to be.

I have been concerned for several years now that we really messed up when raising Nick. Don’t get me wrong…he’s a great kid. He’s got an ever-ready sense of humor, a tenacity and work ethic that exceeds that of many grown men, a kind heart and a quick and sharp intelligence that makes conversing with him very enjoyable. Not the perfect child, but a perfect part of our family.

So where did we mess up? Well, he has grown up with a gourmet’s palette. Because of my love for and talent for cooking, he believes, with all his heart and soul, that food should always be great. An occasionally great meal isn’t sufficient for him. Pizza really ought to be homemade, or at worst the best (read expensive) of the takeouts. Spaghetti sauce should NEVER come from a jar unless it’s a jar of my homemade sauce that I’ve canned. I never need to bother with buying canned soup which is a completely unacceptable substitute for homemade. We don’t need to bother buying the pre-made cookie dough ’cause he would rather spend the extra couple of minutes making his own recipe that includes a touch of maple and is so much better. Even Rice Krispie Squares must be homemade. How did we manage to create this monster?

Last Spring he decided that he wanted to apply for the culinary program at the high school. It’s an alternative program that has the kids spend 1/2 of their day at a distant campus learning culinary skills and cooking, and the other 1/2 day in their regular classrooms. With kids (11th and 12th grades) from 14 school districts applying for the 40 openings, the competition is tough. During his interview he was asked what his first choice destination would be if he could go anywhere in the world to eat. You know what my gourmet child replied? Paris? Rome? New York? Wrong! He answered that he would go home for his Mom’s (that’s me!!!!) cooking. And he got accepted into the program. One of the very few Juniors who were accepted.

This rave of pride for my oldest child leads me to the photo you see above. It’s a cobbler filled…loaded…with peaches and blackberries. I bought a couple boxes of peaches for eating and canning purposes and of course, our property is covered with blackberry bushes. So while Farmer Paul and I were out for our Anniversary dinner, he recruited Austin as his sous chef and modified a peach cobbler recipe to include blackberries. And it was a total, complete, ultimate success.

So join me in recognizing the skill of my son who won’t let me get away with convenience if it sacrifices taste and who has been helping me in the kitchen since he was tall enough to peer over the edge of the counter. Here’s his Peachy Blackberry Double-Crusted Cobbler. The one thing we did decide that needed to be changes, was that the filling should be cooled down before putting the cobbler together to bake. Otherwise the butter in the pie crust melts as soon as it hits the fruit, and the crust doesn’t end up flaky.

DOUBLE CRUSTED PEACH COBBLER

FOR THE CRUST:
3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for shaping and rolling
2 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
16 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
7-10 tablespoons ice water
FOR THE FILLING:
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup water
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon maple flavoring
Pinch salt
6 ripe peaches, peeled, pitted, and cut into 1/4-inch thick slices
2 cups blackberries
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons heavy cream (for brushing top)
cinnamon-sugar (to sprinkle on top)

TO MAKE THE CRUST:
Place flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor and process for 5 seconds. Add butter and process until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Add water, a few tablespoons at a time, until the dough just comes together.

Remove dough and knead lightly on a lightly floured surface until it just comes together. Divide the dough in half and form into disks. Wrap each disk in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes.

Once dough is chilled, remove from the refrigerator and roll each disk into a the approximate size of a 9×13″ pan, approximately 1/4-inch thick. Place on parchment paper-lined baking sheets and return to the refrigerator to chill until ready to assemble.

TO MAKE THE FILLING:
Melt butter in a large high-sided saute pan over medium heat. Add the sugar and water and cook until sugar is dissolved. Add remainder of ingredients and cook for 15 minutes until thickened. Refrigerate until chilled (1 hour or more)

TO MAKE THE COBBLER:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Place half of the peach mixture in the bottom of a 9×13 buttered baking dish using a slotted spoon. Top the peaches with 1 layer of dough.

Bake until the crust is light golden brown.

Remove from the oven and top the crust with the remaining peaches and cover with the other crust. Brush the top crust with heavy cream, sprinkle with cinnamon-sugar, and return to the oven.

Bake until the crust is golden brown and the juices are bubbly. Let cool for at least 30 minutes before cutting and serving.

Yield: 12 servings

A Cobbler from the Wild

Life up here just keeps getting better and better. First the garden started coming in, then the chickens and now blackberries.

When we moved in, there were wild blackberry bushes everywhere and getting them under control was one of the first tasks that they guys tackled. They knocked down tons of bushes with the tractor and then we got six goats who have been eating them and keeping them from growing back. But we still have plenty left.

A couple weeks ago, Farmer Paul took a hike around the property to collect enough blackberries for dessert and came back with a dozen. That’s is…12 berries in the bottom of the 2 gallon bucket. So we waited. And waited. For two weeks. And then today happened. I came home from work to a bowl on the counter overflowing with the luscious, sweet fruit.

But then I had to make the most difficult decision of my entire day. What to do with them! Just eating them with some whipped cream was tempting, but didn’t seem celebratory enough. After all, at this point I can walk out my back door and eat as many berries as I want. It needed to be better than that. What Farmer Paul wanted was a wedge of pie crust tucked into a bowl of berries and topped with whipped cream. What Nick wanted was pound cake covered in berries and cream. Austin and Ryan are easy, they just wanted dessert. Pie crust and pound cake take too long for a weeknight dessert and since I didn’t want to have to wait until 10 before we had dessert, I still had to decide what to do. I started going through my cookbooks.

Then Mom swooped in and rescued me from my indecision. She brought in an old cookbook of hers and flipped it open to a Quick Fruit Cobbler recipe. Quick and easy to whip together…bakes in 40 minutes. Works for me.

Unfortunately, the 40 minutes was more like 60, so it was still later than I wanted before we had dessert, and it was just O.K. Everyone else liked theirs, but I didn’t even bother finishing mine. It wasn’t good enough to waste the calories, especially with our anniversary weekend coming up. I’ll save my calorie allowance for that!

Quick Fruit Cobbler
from the More-with-Less Cookbook
Preheat oven to 350.
Combine in bowl:
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c flour
3/4 c milk
1 1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
Pour into 9×9 greased baking pan.
Add:
3 c. fruit – fresh, frozen or canned.
Bake for 40 minutes. (or an hour!)
I also added about 1/4 c rolled oats to the batter because I was afraid that the fresh berries would add too much juice to the batter.