#38 - Stone Fruits Party
Charred Peaches with Yoghurt and Olive Salsa + Apricot Meringues with Thyme and Brown Butter Almonds
Hello everyone!
It feels as though summer is now in full pelt, with blue skies, warm evenings and tonnes of delicious produce to be gobbling up.
This week’s newsletter is focussed on stone fruits, because the time of year where you get to sink your teeth into juicy nectarines and suchlike is something that needs to be celebrated. You’ve got a recipe for a stunning salad (charred peaches with yoghurt and olive salsa), as well as a big messy pud - apricot meringues with brown butter almonds. I hope you can enjoy cooking them on summer days.
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Big love,
Sophie xx
P.S. My debut cookbook Tucking In is available to buy in bookshops and online now! If you like the recipes from the newsletter, then maybe you’ll like the recipes in there too.
The Recipes
Peaches with Yoghurt and Olive Salsa
When peaches are in the height of their season, you hardly have to do anything to them to make them sing. Lightly charring them and serving them up with yoghurt, pitta chips and an olive salsa gives you all the textures and flavours you need. Sweet! Creamy! Crispy! Bitter! Sharp! Spicy! Think peaches and cream, but the savoury version.
This salad only contains 7 ingredients, but boy do the flavours deliver. It would make a really lovely light lunch, or I can see it as a side at your next barbecue.
Serves 4
3 white pitta breads
1 heaped tsp aleppo chilli, plus a pinch to finish
4 ripe peaches
160g green olives
a small bunch of parsley
1 lemon
400g thick Greek yoghurt
salt and olive oil
Cut your pitta into triangles. Heat a large frying pan over a medium heat, then pour in about 2 tbsp olive oil and your aleppo chilli. Add your pitta pieces, and toss them in the oil to coat them. Fry the pitta for about 8 minutes, turning the pieces frequently until you have crisp golden pitta chips. Season with salt and set them aside until later.
Quarter your peaches, then drizzle them with a little olive oil.
Heat a griddle pan over a high heat, then arrange your peach pieces in the pan (you may need to do this in a couple of batches). Cook them for 2-3 minutes on each side, until they get nice char lines and caramelisation on them.
Drain your olives, then cut them into medium sized chunks (I cut each olive into 6 pieces). Add these to a bowl, then roughly chop your parsley and get that in there too. Add the zest and juice of a lemon, as well as about 4 tbsp olive oil, then give it all a good mix. Season it to taste with salt.
Spoon your yoghurt onto your serving dish, and swoosh it around to the edges. Top it with your peaches and pitta chips, then spoon over your olive salsa. Sprinkle over a little more aleppo chilli and salt, then serve it up.
Apricot Meringues with Thyme and Brown Butter Almonds
It’s high time that apricots got the love they deserve. For too damn long, apricot jam has been shunned for strawberry. They’ve been picked out of tagines and left dwindling on shelves as their larger, juicier cousins the peach and the nectarine get taken home in brown paper bags. Enough is enough! Justice for apricots! This dessert is a very nice way to eat them.
I love a pudding that can be mostly prepped ahead of time, so that when you are in the thick of hosting, you don’t have to leave the fun to go and do a tonne of cooking. This one does exactly that! You could make all elements of this a day in advance (besides the almonds - they are best made fresh), and then do a quick assembly job when it is time to eat.
I first made puddings like this when I worked at Quo Vadis, where we would assemble big, messy, beautiful towers of meringues for parties. They aren’t meant to be tidy, but generous and bountiful, which suits my style of cooking very well indeed.
Oh, and an added bonus is that you use the egg yolks from the meringues to make a creme diplomat of sorts (whipping thick custard into cream, because all puddings are improved by custard).
Serves 8