I’ve been aiming to compile all of my posts on food and drink into another book: Foodies. Not a cookbook per se, although there will be a lot of recipes in it. More of a celebration of food and drink, especially as they have sustained us during the pandemic, as we sure did a lot of eating and drinking! I keep generating new posts about food and drink and don’t seem to know where to stop. My dear wife Kathy tells me to finish on a dessert. Now I face a peculiar situation there. Kathy, shortly after embracing her keto diet, totally lost her taste for sweets. There’s not likely to be a after-meal confection I could conjure for her that will satisfy, and I sneak my ice cream on the sly. But this morning I got inspired to whip up some French toast. We had some sourdough bread over a week old and the concept of the French’s “pain perdu” came to mind. Translated as “lost bread”, this was the bread getting stale that might be tossed. Why not dip it in egg and milk and fry it? Then comes the challenge of what to put over it. Butter and maple syrup always satisfies me, but what do you present to a woman with no sweet tooth? It brought to mind the concoction she came up with during last year’s strawberry season, having found that a little balsalmic vinegar and lemon juice with only a touch of sugar bring out the flavor and juice of the berries without adding the sweet (1).
We had some peaches and blueberries frozen away, and some dried currants on the shelf, and together they went into the food processor. Maybe a half-pound of peaches, a cup of blueberries, and a quarter cup of currants (total volume 2 cups). Plus the magical 2 t balsalmic, 2 T lemon juice, 2 t sugar. A marvelous mix it was, good on the French toast but likely to be good on most anything else, like ice cream. I’m guessing any fruit will work with this formula, and we’ll be experimenting through the coming seasons.
Reference
- Ike B. Sauce. WordPress 7/6/21. https://theviewfromharbal.com/2021/07/06/sauce/
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