Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I love fresh peaches.  Love them.  And my husband?  He does not.  (Neither does the boy, actually.)  For this reason, mostly, I’ve never gotten into the habit of doing much with them when they’re in season–after all, it’s dangerous to make a dessert that I’m going to eat the vast majority of, and I’ve yet to acquire a canner and do any actual canning myself.  (I do freeze tomatoes and applesauce–separately, you understand–and I have hopes of canning once I’m out of the toddler stage.  I don’t do well undertaking prolonged projects when the danger of interruption is high.)  My neighbor, however, has a couple of peach trees in his yard, and this year he had a bumper crop.  I haven’t done as much with them as I’d like (although when my parents were visiting, we consumed rather a lot of them with Breyers Natural Vanilla ice cream), but I was looking through recipes the other night for a new breakfast bread to try for dinner (it was that kind of day), and I saw this recipe for Peach Streusel Muffins. Normally I would have had to pass it by regretfully, wishing I had  peaches on hand, but this time I thought–hey!  I know a guy!  I know a guy who’s actually trying to get rid of fresh peaches!  SCORE!

And so we had peach streusel muffins for dinner that night.  I pretty much followed the recipe, too, if you don’t count being casual about things like salted/unsalted butter.  I did sub in some wheat flour–I looked at the ingredients and decided that was the only way I could justify serving those muffins for dinner–but that’s pretty much it.  (They would have been lighter and fluffier without it, certainly, but I needed there to be a bit more substance to them.  Ah, well.)  The girlies were definitely fans, no doubt about it.  The boy, on the other hand, picked each and every peach out of his muffin before he ate it and refused to touch them, no matter what inducements were offered.  (Grrrr.)  My hubby said they were okay, which was probably high praise.

And I?  Well, my hubby liked them because “they weren’t strong peach,” and that was exactly my problem.  I LOVE FRESH PEACHES.  If I’m going to go to the trouble of peeling and chopping them, not to mention the trouble of making and adding both a streusel and a glaze on top of the muffins, I want the muffins to TASTE like peaches.  They were good muffins, yes, but the streusel and the glaze were the best part about them.  The peaches were a background note, and I wanted them to shine.

Of course, if you have your own peach tree and peaches are coming out your ears, so to speak, it’s worth it.  I mean, they were yummy.  But if peaches are a bit more of a treat to you, I’d look for a recipe that showcases them more.  Then again, it’s always up to you!