Adventures in Cooking - Chapter 2 Peach Cobbler

This post is for my son living in the Peach State.  I have included step by step pictures of my latest adventure and there's no frying involved. The Peach Cobbler recipe is from Allrecipes.com and I am not sure if I can legally post the recipe since it's not mine. The link for the recipe is here: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Southern-Peach-Cobbler-2/Detail.aspx.
To begin, I, of course was not happy with the four servings, but dear, sweet son, I think you can use the square pan that your loving mother gave you to make this recipe (4 servings). I wanted to make it in a 13 x 9 dish and had to google the dish to figure out how many quarts, way too much math for me, but luckily, other sites such as this Baking site had the answers for me. And then once I figured out that I wanted to make a larger cobbler, than the 8 smallish peaches from the CSA were going to need some helps, off to the farmer's market, my husband went to get 4 more larger peaches. I then doubled the rest of the ingredients. (All thoughts of calorie counting and lowering my cholesterol went out the window- Amount Per Serving  Calories: 512 | Total Fat: 17.6g | Cholesterol: 46mg)

How to peel peaches? Didn't sound too easy, but review for the recipe said to boil them first and then the skin would slide off. Worked great for the small, ripe peaches, not as well with the harder peaches.




See how easy the skin just peels off by hand? The not so ripe peaches required longer boiling and a knife.

I had fresh lemon juice in the bowl already to mix the peaches with to slow the browning.  Once they are cut, there's a ton of sugar, both brown and white that you mix the peaches with along with a little cornstarch, cinnamon and nutmeg.



Then you just spread the fruit mixture in the baking dish and place it in the preheated oven to cook for 10 minutes. 

The darker color peaches are the riper peaches.

Before getting into the fruit prep,  I should have started off by saying that I had the flour mixture all measured out and in another bowl while I was doing the peach peeling. Once the fruit was in the oven, I then cut in the cold butter with my pastry cutter, but you can use a fork or two butter knives to make the flour mixture look "pebbly".
After adding in the hot water, the flour mixture got goopy and I plopped it on the hot fruit in a couple of areas and then spread it out with a spatula, not really caring if the fruit got mixed a little bit. Not so appetizing now....




Once the dough got spread out, it looked much better, especially with the cinnamon sugar mix sprinkled on top. (you don't need to make as much as the recipe calls for this topping).

After baking, it looked and smelled delicious. To serve, I made some homemade whip cream with heavy cream, but I guess you can use that can or plastic canister whipped product, your taste. It was a hit with my in-laws and my family. We enjoyed the left overs for breakfast.

Which brings me to the definition of what becomes a cooking adventure. For me, a cooking adventure entails me cooking something I haven't cooked before, including a new technique or ingredient. In this case, the simple peach, oh so fuzzy, fresh- peaches! The first adventure included a very sad pie crust, stay tuned for more adventures.
And what makes this recipe simple for second son in Georgia? A. Peaches B. No mixer needed