looky looky, the blog got props!

i know i said i was taking a break but...i do check in to see if anyone leaves a comment, see what kind of traffic there has been and when i noticed a huge jump in hits, i was curious. looking further i noticed that besides the usual traffic from love and olive oil (a nashville food blog that has a link to my page) and other assorted visitors, there were also many hits from blogs.com. it seems that they have chosen easier than pie as one of the top 10 food blogs in nashville. today, the blog also received a little love from nashville bites, a food blog from the nashville scene. so i ask all of you to join me in a little raucous happy dance while i hoot and holler!!! thanks to everyone who visits and helped make this happen! look for me to be back in action next week, hopefully. we will close on our sba disaster loan in a few days and soon hope to start the repairs so it could get a little crazy around the house but i will try my best to keep it all together. thanks again nashville!

ain't that just peachy? ttb 7/16

i have spent my week looking at a large basket of peaches and many little baskets of blueberries. the peaches are starting to ripen-perfectly. slightly firm but bite into one and the juices run. they are also full of flavor and hard to resist even if they are a bit on the fuzzy side. earlier in the week i made a peach brown betty with biscuits but today, i made one of my favorite recipes from the book, blueberry peach cornbread buckle. the cake goes together like so:

peeled and diced peaches

toss them with blueberries, lemon zest and sugar-let them macerate

mix up some cornbread, slightly sweet, and pour it into the pan

spread the macerated fruit and juices evenly over the top then sprinkle the crumb topping over the fruit. into the oven she goes

fully baked and out of the pan-waiting to be cut into squares

some of the fruit sinks, some stays at the top-it buckles, get it?

cake for breakfast-what more could you possibly need?

taste the book, 7/7

the dessert featured this week is butterscotch pudding. ever since i was little, i have had a thing for the hard yellow disk shaped candies-sweet and buttery and a little salty too. butter rum lifesavers were also a favorite of mine. so it shouldn't be a surprise that i would like butterscotch pudding unless you have tasted the stuff in the box-eww...same goes for the chips that are used to make cookies-they don't taste anything like butterscotch! many recipes that call themselves butterscotch just include brown sugar and butter-close, but...to really get the flavor of the hard candies, you need to combine 3 things: caramelized brown sugar, dark rum and kosher salt.

burning the sugar is tricky. take it too far and it will scorch the pot and you will have lovely black flakes in the pudding. (doesn't that sound like experience talking?) 265 degrees is as far as you want to go, so use a thermometer. (the hoods in the kitchen are loud-you may want to turn off the volume for this video)

dark rum-the darker the better and real unsalted butter help flavor the pudding. use the unsalted butter because it is a higher quality than salted and add kosher salt because it tastes better than iodized salt.

a lovely little dish of pudding

be sure to hide it from the wait staff...

come on in and taste the book!