Colorado Beauties: Summer Peach Pie with Vanilla & Cardamom

Summer Peach Pie - Oh my.

I started to write this post almost exactly a year ago.  A colleague of Matt's from London happens to own a house in the amazingly beautiful mountains of Western Colorado - in  Telluride to be exact - and he invited us for a weekend trip at the last minute.  Despite the long drive (6-7 hours), and the fact that we hadn't even finished unpacking our house completely, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to see friends again and to also explore the other side of this beautiful Rocky Mountain state we had just moved to a month before.

I racked my brain for what I could bring with us as a gift to the hosts.  My eyes and hands had been wandering to the piles of Colorado peaches available at this time of year in the grocery stores, and so when I found a recipe for summer peach pie out of Bon Appetit - something I'd never tried - I was sold on the idea.  Luckily, I happened to also know that these particular friends of ours are as big of fans of dessert and pies as we are.  The recipe I found included cardamom which I felt was a nice shout-out to the Middle Eastern experiences we had all shared while Matt and co. worked at a Bahrain-based bank in London.  Perfect.

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View for the weekend.

The drive through Colorado was a sort of unexpected initiation into life in "the west": plains, mountains, forests, rivers and streams.  We saw much of the best of what Colorado has to offer in terms of scenery and ambiance, and felt ourselves thinking - hoping - that maybe, just maybe, this really could be our forever home.  Not just out of convenience and circumstance, but because we could see ourselves truly falling in love with it.

We wound our way up mountain roads, following the slightly-less-than-precise directions ("take a left at the third cattle crossing and then drive for a mile until you see the small wind turbine...") and getting lost in beautiful, verdent and whispery Aspen groves.  We passed an abandoned ranch where John Wayne's True Grit was filmed back in the day, listening to John Denver and snapping pictures of all the seemingly untouched, natural beauty.

The peach pie was a hit; and it turns out our friend is particularly fond of both peach pie and cardamom (which was quite a good thing, the latter being, admittedly, quite an acquired taste for Americans). 

Here's the recipe.  Take advantage of those August peaches.  They are a fleeting pleasure, but the sweetness does stay with you the rest of the year - much like that trip last summer has stayed with us.

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Summer Peach Pie with Vanilla & Cardamom

From Bon Appetit; found at Epicurious.com
Serves 6-8

Colorado Peaches

Ingredients 

2/3 cup plus 2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 vanilla bean, cut crosswise into 1/2-inch pieces
3 tablespoons unbleached all purpose flour
1/3-1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
3 3/4 pounds firm but ripe unpeeled peaches, halved, pitted, each half cut into 4 slices (about 10 cups)
2 Best-Ever Pie Crust dough disks
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
Whipping cream (for glaze)
Vanilla ice cream (optional; to serve with it)

Method

Position rack in bottom third of oven and preheat to 400°F. 

Combine 2/3 cup sugar and vanilla bean in processor; blend until vanilla bean is very finely minced. Sift vanilla sugar through strainer into large bowl; discard any large bits in strainer. Mix flour and cardamom into vanilla sugar. Add peaches to flour-sugar mixture and toss gently to coat.

Roll out 1 pie crust disk on floured surface to 12-inch round. Transfer to 9-inch-diameter glass pie dish. Trim dough overhang to 1/2 inch. Spoon peach mixture into crust; dot with butter. Roll out second pie crust disk on lightly floured surface to 12-inch round. Drape dough over peach filling; trim overhang to 1 1/2 inches. Fold top and bottom edges under, pressing together to seal. Crimp edges decoratively. Using small sharp knife, cut 2-inch-long X in center of top crust to allow steam to escape. Brush crust lightly with whipping cream; sprinkle with remaining 2 teaspoons sugar.

Place pie on rimmed baking sheet. Bake until crust is golden, peaches are tender, and juices bubble thickly through cut in top crust, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Transfer pie to rack and cool until lukewarm, about 2 hours.

Serve pie warm or at room temperature with vanilla ice cream.

ετσι ειναι η ζωη: Livin' the good life, Greek-style.

My Frappe: Metrios Me Gala

ετσι ειναι η ζωη: Such is life.

(phonetic: etsee-eeneh-ee-zoe-ee)

This was one of the first phrases I learned from my Notre Dame-North-Carolina-Indiana-Jones Professor upon arriving in Ancient Corinth in 2003.  Such is life.  At the time I was in full Greek-immersion mode, "efharistoe"-ing my way around the picturesque village, downing bowls of avgolemono and living mostly off of homemade wine bought from the little old lady's back room in a tiny village outside of town, that we, naturally, used to store in large, plastic gasoline containers on the front porch.  Life seemed good.  It seemed very good.

When I think back to that brief period on the Peloponesos in the summer of 2003, I recall nothing but the ideal of what life was: hot summer days, the esoteric beauty of piecing together Ancient yellow-limestone Corinthian roof tiles to reconstruct a geometric era temple, of meeting third-generation Pot-shard experts from the local village and watching them apprentice their sons for the same, the views of the peninsula from the top of Acrocorinth (Ακροκόρινθος), that first dinner at the local taverna where I learned how to properly pronounce Moussaka (μουσακά), eating raw garlic by the clove with 20-hour cooked mutton and homemade bread and cheese in the mountains, pathetic attempts at sketching Penteskoufi (a tiny ruined village nestled in a beautiful valley near our house), learning to orient myself based solely on the Isthmus and the surrounding mountains, diving into the impossibly beautiful waters of Perachora on a hot summer day and admiring the bountiful sea urchin next to the ancient Greek ruins of the Heraion (Ηραίο Περαχώρας), eating freshly washed, ice-cold cherries at a roadside restaurant with a view of the ocean and a nice breeze after cruising at indecent speeds in our cooky professor's dilapidated, A/C-less, white Lada, window shopping in modern Corinth while sipping a Greek Frappe (Metrio me Gala, for the record), learning bazouki songs after a giant outdoor barbecue of a whole lamb in a hand-dug charcoal pit, laughing and singing and telling stories late into the night, every single night, with a tiny glass of wine (ποτηράκι) in hand.

I didn't tend to think about the less than ideal aspects of the "good life" in a tiny village in Greece: village gossip - especially about expats and the new "archeology arrivals," constantly changing rivalries between family-owned restaurants and bars which effectively reduce your eating options by 50%, no hot showers - and no indoor showers, for that matter - oh, and no indoor toilets either, no air conditioning (even when it's bitterly hot), being jokingly punished for too much drinking by being forced to climb Acrocorinth while seriously hung-over, a mostly-vegetarian diet (this was particularly painful for me), sleeping in a room with crumbling ceilings and a perpetual fear of rodents, lizards and spiders crawling between your sheets, endless afternoons spent sketching temple blocks on graph paper in a hot room, or even more endless afternoons spent sorting through endless piles of said-ancient temple blocks to catalog and re-sketch them again.  The list goes on.

Still, that summer, like many others I've lived, is one suspended forever in my mind and heart as representing a form of true happiness - the kind built upon utter simplicity and freedom, making it ever-memorable and, in its own imperfection, perfect.  And the one culinary memory that best represents that carefree Grecian summer for me is the Greek Frappé.  I drank them every chance I got.  They were one of the first things I learned to order on my own.  And they hit the spot on a hot, dry afternoon of too much antiquity.

Summer these days is, admittedly, full of neighborhood pools and play dates more than leisurely dips in pristine Hellenic waters, but, one day in June, on a perfect Denver afternoon, I decided to take a moment for myself by making a frappé after almost a year since touching my $13 / can Greek Nescafe.  It transported me immediately.  And reminded me that whether it's the Colorado sun, or the Corinthian heat, summer is summer.  Happy is happy.  And ετσι ειναι η ζωη: Such is life.

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Image credit

To make your own frappé, first, find a Greek grocer near you and purchase this.  Then go to Frappé Nation and check out their real Greek recipe and method.  I prefer mine metrios (2 sugars) "me gala" - with milk.  If you have regular American Nescafe, just add more coffee.