I had a couple of extra busy weekends with Harmony Board orders. So far this first summer of Harmony Boards has been exactly as expected, slow! But for some reason, the first and second weekends of August exploded.

With that in mind, I may have been a tad overzealous about stone fruit season. First I went to Costco and bought huge clamshells of peaches, red & Rainer cherries, and red plums.

A day or two later I was at Sprouts shopping for purple (a purple soup recipe coming for you soon) and orange cauliflower for Crudités Harmony Boards.

It was then when I saw the extensive variety of stone fruit in season and on sale.  There were pink, red, and black flesh plums, yellow plumcots, Jupiter peaches, nectarines, white peaches, etc.

As my vacation to Canada with Kim drew near, I knew I had more stone fruit on hand than I had orders… oops. I was eating overripe plums for breakfast and snacks. Then it was cherries and peaches for lunch and after-dinner dessert.

While I was finishing up my final orders on the weekend before my flight, I knew I had to do more than snack on the quickly ripening fruit. I invited Connor and my dad over for dinner and made this salad.

* In my next post I’ll show you what I did with the remaining bits and pieces of fruit, cheese, and veggies before I escaped the heat.

It was about 15 months ago that I had a new little peach tree planted. No, that is not it in the photo above. That is the peach tree from my last house that got so large and so loaded down with peaches that nearly all the branches broke off. That tree was removed when we remodeled the backyard and a new smaller tree was planted.

It was a dwarf peach and as little as it was, it was mighty. It produced the most lovely perfect peaches.

This is my newest peach tree. I stripped it clean of all the ripe peaches over the weekend.

As you can see, the peaches were very petite for this first harvest.

But there were lots of them! I decided that there was too much skin to flesh ratio to be used in desserts, so I used them in savory dishes instead.

The first dish is a salad. A twist on the classic Caprese. I threw in some apriums, also known as pluots. Apriums and pluots are hybrids of apricots and plums.

A pluot is mostly plum, it looks more like a plum than an apricot. The flesh is soft and grainy, unlike the firm flesh of a plum. The aprium, on the other hand, has skin covered with slight fuzz and tastes like a sweeter apricot with a hint of plum.

Two recipe notes: I used balsamic vinegar for my vinaigrette, but I strongly suggest using white balsamic vinegar instead. The dark dressing made the salad less attractive than it should have been. It tasted great, but the dressing covered up the beautiful colors of the fruit, tomatoes and basil. It did nothing for the mozzarella either. I also had a log of sliced fresh mozzarella on hand, so used it instead of the mozzarella balls listed in the recipe. If you have to go out and buy the cheese, get the cute little rounds.

Steve and Tram are building a new home. Their house recently sold and they have to be out in a month. They love to entertain but haven’t been in the position to do so for months now. The reason? Well, many of us know how difficult it is to keep our homes clean and ready to show at the drop of a hat. Imagine trying to do that with two full-time jobs and 2-year old twins. Talk about stressful!

Saturday night, the overachieving duo hosted an intimate dinner party. Steve was the stellar chef and pitmaster and Tram was the dessert queen.

It’s bittersweet to sell the house you brought your babies home to, so Tram lovingly called the evening The Last Supper. I call it a Housecooling, you know, the opposite of a Housewarming.

I created a new cocktail for the occasion, so in honor of Zak and Zoey’s first home, I’m attaching that moniker to the drink.

I’m already looking forward to the Housewarming Party!

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It would be nearly impossible to have a “summer fresh fruit week” without a pie or two…or three.

I’m so into the refrigerated pie crust that Connor turned me onto, that I bought a half-dozen boxes when I found them on sale at Safeway.

They are in the freezer and I’m “pie-ready” for the summer!

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Kim gifted me with fresh Mission figs and sweet little plums. I know, it’s like a darn fruit stand over here!

I ate all the plums straight away and then worked the figs and all those peaches, ripening and being picked each and every day, into our meals.

What follows is one of the quickest and easiest of the bunch.

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The parade of peaches continues. Yesterday the peach salsa had the extra benefit of mango and strawberry.

Today’s salad gets an extra fruity punch from apricot.

Dave is the salad lover in our family. I love soup. But I will admit, I do love this salad.

Oh, and I used the sliced honey roasted almonds from Trader Joe’s but plain sliced or slivered almonds, or any nut of your choice for that matter, would work perfectly fine. I would just toast them in a dry skillet or in the oven first. Enjoy!

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On Friday night we had a little reunion of sorts. Our dear friends and former neighbors, Lori and Jonathon, were in town for the week.

In December, Tram and I flew to Chicago to visit them and do a bit of Christmas shopping. We had an absolute ball! I meant to blog about our trip but I never got around to it, you know, with the holiday rush and all.

Tram and Steve and Lori and Jonathon came over for dinner and we had the very best time! I’ll be posting recipes all week; appetizers, cocktails, starters, salads, and even a salt block cooking recipe. I’m going, to begin with a gorgeous smoked salmon appetizer. It’s hard to take that first chunk out of it because it’s so beautiful, but once you get going on it, it’s hard to stop. It’s as delicious as it is lovely.

There is no cooking involved and you’ll be using a food processor to put it together. As such, I’ll be tagging this one as an Easy-Breezy Recipe.

Once you add the herbs, you want to use the Pulse button ONLY. You don’t want the mixture to turn green from the herbs or the processor to turn the salmon and cranberries into baby food. What you’re going for is a cohesive mixture with a bit of texture.

Fresh Fruit – Smoked Salmon Spread

• 4-ounces cream cheese, softened
• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon each; fresh minced dill, mint, and thyme
• 24-ounce package of smoked salmon
• 1/2 cup crushed pineapple, drained
• 1/3 cup dried cranberries
• 1/2 cup chopped dry roasted almonds
• Fresh sliced peaches, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and fresh sprigs of thyme, basil, dill, and/or mint for garnish
• Crackers for serving

Place the cream cheese in the bowl of a food processor and blend; add the mayonnaise and salt and blend until smooth.

Using the pulse button, add in the fresh herbs with only 2 or 3 short pulses.

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I found a recipe on the internet that I’m going to recommend you do not make.

On Sunday, Father’s Day, I arrived home from the airport at about 3:45 and immediately began to make dinner for my dad, husband, and son.  Since I’d already been awake for 12 hours, I didn’t want to have to think too hard about what to make.

Since I have a peach tree that was full of ripe peaches, I decided to whip up a peach cobbler for dessert.

I wanted to be able to post the recipe so it needed to be somewhat different from the three peach cobbler/crumble recipes I already have posted here. For that reason, I turned to the web to find one that I could “make my own” and get done easily and quickly.

The recipe I stumbled upon first was the Pioneer Woman’s Peach Cobbler. Her version used frozen peaches and since I was using fresh, I figured that would be a perfect recipe to switch up. I made a few other minor changes, with the addition of spices and such, and popped it into the oven while I made the rest of the meal.

I’ve tried many of the Pioneer Woman’s recipes before and they’ve always been wonderful. I thought that this too would be a “sure thing.”

In fact, I’ve loved a couple of them so much that I reposted them, almost exactly as originally written. This Dip recipe and this Poppers recipe are two of my all-time favorites. So please do not take this as a bashing of the Pioneer Woman and her recipes – but this peach cobbler recipe is one that I can not endorse. No way, no how.

Instead, you should make one of the three peach cobbler/crisp recipes I’ve previously posted – one of the ones I should have made for Father’s Day.

Mason Jar Peach and Berry Cobbler

Peach-Blueberry Cobbler

Blueberry-Nectarine Crumble

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You didn’t think I’d do a week of “Stone Fruit” recipes without making a pie, a crisp, or a crumble – did you?

Of course, you didn’t!

This is one of the easiest and tastiest desserts around … a stone fruit crumble. Enjoy!

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