J.R. Johnson

I recently tested two new recipes. One worked, one (through no fault of its own) not so much. I’ll start with the less good.

Butterscotch Peaches Recipe – NYT Cooking

The recipe is fine, the butterscotch flavor excellent, and it could have turned out great. Emphasis on “could.”

If you don’t have access to the New York Times recipe collection, here are the ingredients I used:

• 6 medium or 5 large ripe peaches
• 4 T. unsalted butter
• ½ C. cream
• ½ C. sugar
• 1 T. maple syrup
• Pinch of salt
• ¾ t. vanilla

• In sum: peel and chop the peaches, brown the butter and sauté the peaches for three minutes, then let rest. In a second pan, add all remaining ingredients except vanilla. Stir over low heat until the sugar is dissolved, then raise heat to medium and let simmer/boil for 12 minutes or until browned. Add to peaches and stir to combine.

The result? My peaches were a bit of a disaster. The first peaches of the season often are, but I held out hope. They were beautiful, I‘ll give them that, but after washing and scoring and boiling and peeling (a pain, I’d skip it next time) and slicing, I had to accept the facts.

The peaches were decidedly mediocre. All but two had at least some internal brown spots, and three were nothing but mush. And eaten fresh, even the prettiest fruit was mealy and low on flavor.

I cooked them up and made the butterscotch. Then, as I was nearing the finish line, I waffled over the final product. Should I go ahead with the subpar peaches or skip the fruit and just eat the butterscotch? While I considered my options, the butterscotch started to harden. By the time I decided to say what the hell, I was on my way to Candyland. As in, the butterscotch was hardening into delicious-yet-difficult-to-mix candy.

I went with it in the end. The final product tasted good, actually, but there were chunks of semi-solidified butterscotch throughout. (It would have made for a delicious addition to ice cream, in fact. Maybe next time.)

* * *

On to the good:

So there I was, stalking Felicia Day’s library on Goodreads (as one does), when I ran across this book:

I picked up a copy last week.

I need to start testing some of the thousand (!) recipes here, but if there is a more perfect type of cookbook for me, I don’t know what it is. I love the ease, reliability and reach of books like Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, but this new book’s approach not only tests the many (many) variations of each recipe, it also tells you what they tried, why, and with what results. Then you get the finalized recipe.

I made the banana bread. Mr Man’s double helping for dessert say it was a success.

* * *