That would be nectarines.

I don’t remember ever really eating nectarines before this summer. Maybe that would be because I bought them in the grocery store, out of season, and they were flavorless? I don’t know. Could be.

Anyway, when I went to the farm last week, I bought a bushel of nectarines along with my two bushels of Rambo apples. These nectarines are to die for. I’m serious. They are juicy and sweet and tangy tart. It was a cinch to slice them open and pop the pit out. I’ve been making dishes with these Nectar For The Gods ever since.

I tried canning five quarts of the nectarines. I don’t know if they will be very good because I (or rather, my mother) have a hunch that they will get mushy. If that is the case, then I plan to mush them up even more, thicken them with a little sugar and cornstarch, and serve them in parfait glasses with whipped cream and a crispy ginger cookie alongside.

I dried them, too, and they shriveled up just dandy. I think I have five quarts of chewy sweet-tart pieces packed away.

I plan to purchase another bushel, maybe two, next year, and there’s a chance I’ll even look into getting some nectarine trees for our orchard. They’re my new favorite, after all.

A new baby? Huh?

No, I’m not pregnant, and no, I’m not going to be pregnant (better not, anyway). I’m talking about something totally different: my bread baby.

Huh?

Maybe I should start at the beginning.

Back when Mr. Handsome and I got married, our friends, David and Tina, gave us a cookbook, Nancy Silverton’s Breads From La Brea Bakery.

I skimmed through it, but it appeared way too intimidating, so I put it on my shelf and there it sat for nearly a decade. Then, in the late fall of 2006 when I was swollen with the lump that was to become The Baby Nickel, I decided to give the book a shot.

That meant that I had to make my own sourdough starter from flour, water, and grapes. It took twenty-one days untill the starter was strong enough to use in bread making. Once it reached a steady strength, I had to maintain it by feeding it three times a day, morning, noon, and night. Thus the reason I called it My Bread Baby.

I had been baking bread with the starter for only several weeks when The Baby Nickel was born. His was a home birth and my goal was to push him out during the night and by morning be up and about, cooking food and feeding my bread baby as well as my human baby. Basically, I wanted to be Super Woman. (There are women who do that, you know. They’re up and about making waffles for the midwives. Or so I’ve heard.)

That wasn’t the way things turned, however. (Do I hear you laughing at me? That’s not nice!)

I ended up in the hospital for 24 hours (hang that placenta), but I wrote down the instructions for feeding the other baby, and my mother came through for me. Two and a half weeks later I ended up in the hospital again, this time for four days (darn that blood poisoning), and once again my mother, husband, and whoever was running the house at the moment, picked up the slack.

When I got home, my bread baby was none the worse for wear, and I was much better (thanks to two blood transfusions and some powerful antibiotics), so I picked up where I left off, feeding two babies now, instead of one.

I thought I would never be able to make authentic sourdough bread, you know, the artisan/European kind, because I didn’t have the right oven, not to mention the right training. But Silverton’s book was fantastic, teaching me step by step, all the details, the science. I was turning out bread, just with flour, sea salt, and water, that had a hard crust, chewy inside, good hole structure. (Mr. Handsome loved to act all important by picking up a loaf he had just cut into, putting his nose up close to it, scrutinizing the inside and then declaring, “Ah, look at that hole structure.”) I felt like a magician—powerful, amazing, superhuman. It helped to take away the sting of not being able to serve waffles to the midwives.

It took two days to turn out a batch (two loaves) of bread because the bread had to do an overnight proof in the fridge. I bought a digital thermometer so I could read the exact temperature of the dough. I learned to make rye starter and whole wheat starter (so yes, then I had three bread babies to feed). I learned to knead the bread with a special slam-dunk-slap that was satisfyingly loud and quite therapeutic, and then I learned to knead it in Mr. Handsome’s Grandfather’s Kitchen Aid mixer, which was annoyingly loud, but quite relaxing.

Country White, Chocolate-Sour Cherry, Raisin Brioche, Fig-Anise, Pumpkin, Whole-Wheat, George’s Seeded Sour, Red Pepper-Scallion, Rosemary-Olive Oil, Potato-Dill, Whole-Wheat Sandwich, Pumpernickel, Multigrain, Izzy’s New York Rye, Parmesan Cheese, Sesame-Semolina, Rustic, Focaccia, Italian Ring, Baguette—these are the breads that I made. From the leftover starter I made dog biscuits and sourdough pancakes and waffles. We feasted on bread. Hot from the oven, the crust would shatter under the knife, and we’d spread it thickly with butter which would then melt and drip through the holes onto our hands and trickle down our wrists.

I was nursing a big fat baby, so I could do things like that.

I think it was around that time that I started to call myself The Kitchen Goddess. Privately, of course. My self-esteem had never been higher (I don’t know if that’s really true, but it could be).

So now our grapes are ripe and need to be picked soon. (I’m going to make the starter from our homegrown grapes this year—this bread baby is going all-natural!) The urge to conceive is getting pretty strong.

A couple years ago, three actually, because I was pregnant with The Baby Nickel at the time, we started to buy our milk from a farm. (The funny thing was, I couldn’t stand the taste or smell of raw milk because of being pregnant, so I couldn’t drink any or eat any of the yogurt or ice cream I made from it, but once the baby popped out, I was just fine. Odd, huh?)

Buying raw milk is an expensive proposition, but Mr. Handsome and I squeezed our eyes tight shut, gritted our teeth, and wrote out a check for the purchase of two shares. Then we opened our eyes and smiled. Or rather, I smiled, and Mr. Handsome grimaced—he wasn’t as in to the spending-money-on-expensive-groceries thing. We get two gallons of raw milk every week, and we also buy an extra half gallon every week and just put the cash in the little money box on the table inside the door of the milk shed. I still have to buy a gallon of milk from the store about once every week, but that’s okay.

There are usually two or three inches of thick cream at the top of each milk jar which I skim off and put in smaller jars. Some goes into the refrigerator for my coffee, but most of it goes into quart jars and then into the freezer. (Only fill the jars 3/4 full because the cream expands in the freezer—if it’s filled too full, the glass will break. Trust me, I know.) I pull out a jar of cream when we get the urge to make homemade ice cream, but usually the jars just sit in there. Once I have a stockpile of frozen cream, about 8-12 jars, then it’s time to make butter.

I remove the jars from the freezer, take their lids off, set the jars on my back hall counter, and cover them with a clean cloth.

Allow the jars to sit there for two or three days to ripen; the cream turns into butter faster when the cream has had time to age first.

(I make a sour butter, one that is not good for eating fresh, but is very good for baking—in a recipe I’ll usually use half bought butter and half homemade. If you would like to make butter for fresh eating, use fresh cream and do not culture it.)

On butter-making day, using my meat baster tube thing, I suction out the milk that is sitting on the bottom of the jars and squirt it into a big bowl. Even though I only put cream in the jars, the cream still rises, leaving some milk at the bottom. By omitting the extra milk, I can fit more cream in my churn and get the whole process done faster.

I dump three or four jars of cream, depending on how full they are, into my butter churn, gifted to me by the very generous Grand Matriarch, screw the lid on tight, put a towel on the floor, snag a kid, and order them to start cranking. I set the timer for five or ten minutes per kid and they rotate through, doing their part.

Now, if you do not have a butter churn, you can still make butter by using a blender. Actually, that is how my Aunt Valerie taught me. You simply whirl the cream in the blender, with the lid off and while stirring the top part gently with a wooden spoon (if you dip the wood spoon in to the blender too far then you will get butter with wood chips—not a good idea at all).

Once the butter has come, I pour off the buttermilk into the same big bowl into which I had squirted the bottom milk and dump the butter into a second bowl.

This buttermilk is pure golden, so don’t you dare throw it out—it’s my favorite part of butter-making. To culture the buttermilk, I fill clean quart jars 3/4 of the way full (they will eventually go in the freezer) and, leaving the lids off, I set them on the counter in the back hall, covered with a clean cloth, and let them ripen for a couple more days. I know it has cultured when the buttermilk is solid, like yogurt, and I can see little holes and cracks in the buttermilk in the sides of the jars. (You can use the buttermilk without culturing it first, but I think cultured buttermilk adds more depth and pizazz to baked good. Whatever that means.)

Then I put lids on the jars, label and date them, and pop them in the freezer. I use my buttermilk mostly for pancakes and waffles (it makes them light and sky-high fluffy), but not for salad dressings or drinks—the flavor is too strong for that, I think.

When the churning process is complete and I have a big bowl of butter, then it’s time to wash it.

I do this by setting the bowl in the sink and letting cold water run into the bowl while at the same time using my hand to press and turn the butter, pushing out the last drops of buttermilk.

Once the water runs off clear, no longer white and milky, I push out the last of the water. Then I add a couple teaspoons of salt and knead it in to the butter. This turned out to be about two pounds of butter, but I didn’t know that then. I just eyeballed it, aiming for about a teaspoon per pound.

I measure the butter using a half-cup measure (equals one stick of store-bought butter, see?) and place the measured blobs on pieces of plastic wrap.

I wrap the butters up, put them in a bowl, and set the bowl in the fridge.

After several days, I put the butters in a plastic bag and move them to the freezer.