Spiced Peaches and Malted Waffles

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Generally speaking, peaches are available almost year-round in my part of the country.  They sit in their little basket in the super market produce section month after month; little fuzzy baseballs waiting to be picked up by a shopper who doesn't find it at all suspicious that there are peaches in January.

Take my advice: you do not want the January peaches.

Really, I am not so keen on buying peaches in October either, but as I found myself digging through piles of old lemons looking for a fresh survivor ( get your produce game together, Publix ), I realized I couldn't smell the citrus at all.  Instead, I was surrounded with the nearly sickeningly sweet smell of fresh, ripe peaches.

Maybe the October peaches weren't so bad, after all...

I'm not sure why, but I got two pounds of peaches.  People, this is a LOT of peaches.  I bought a few that felt like rocks so that they could ripen over the next few days, but most of my selection was nearly ripe or ripe.

I may or may not have scarfed one down on the way home, finishing the last few turns with the heels of my palms on the steering wheel because my fingers were covered in peach juice.  This is why we can't have anything nice.

I had big recipe plans for the peaches, but by the end of the week I had averaged about a peach and a half a day, leaving me only two January-style rock hard peaches left to cook with.  They were too hard to eat plain, and were not yet sweet enough to throw into a smoothie or freeze for later, so I knew I'd have to cook them just a little to draw out that rich, sweet peach flavor.

I made some malted Belgian waffles with a malted flour that I get from World Market, but they have it on Amazon, too , and topped it with the spiced peaches.  It was so good, that I might be tempted to try this recipe with the January peaches next year, after all.

SPICED PEACHES

• 1 large peach, slightly underripe
• 2 Tablespoons Light Brown Sugar
• 1 ½ Tablespoons Butter
• 2 Tablespoons Dark ( Spiced ) Rum
• 2 teaspoons good-quality Vanilla Extract
• pinch of salt

Slice your peach and place in in a bowl.  Sprinkle the sugar and a super small pinch of salt ( less than ⅛th of a teaspoon) over the peaches, and toss to combine.  Do something else for 5 minutes ( like, say ... make waffles!!!), and let the sugar and salt do their magic on the peaches.

Fast forward 5 minutes, you are hopefully already making waffles.  Melt the butter over medium heat in a stainless sauté pan.  Once the butter is melted, add the vanilla extract to the pan. Stir to combine.

Add the peach mixture, making sure to scrape any juices hanging around the bottom of the bowl into the pan, too.

Stir the peaches and butter in the pan, making sure to coat the peaches with the sauce that is cooking as you go.

Continue lightly stirring until the sugar has melted into the butter.

Add the rum. Continue stirring.

Remove from heat and let the sauce cool off before serving.  Resist the urge to taste, unless you want rummy sugar butter fused to your tongue for the rest of the week.  It's not nearly as delightful as it sounds like it would be.

 

MALTED WAFFLES

• 1 cup malted flour
• 5 ounces water
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons melted butter

Whisk the egg and water together until frothy.

Whisk in the flour until well combined.

Whisk in the melted butter, then let everything sit for at least a minute ( the batter will start to look bubbly or frothier than it looked before while the malt does its thing ).

My waffle maker takes about ½ cup of batter for each waffle, so with that measurement, I got three waffles.

 

Servings: 3 waffles, each with ⅓ of peach mixture on top