Peaches Divine

You may have noticed from my past comments that I consumed six peaches in one day. Three days later, I realized I ate a total of 14!  You haven't lived until you've eaten these "special" peaches.  My first time back to Taiwan, my dad's cousin's mom made these seasoned, marinated, pickled peaches with asian, salted dried prunes.  In fact, I'm eating a peach as I type.  Heaven. 

My dad, sister and I have a shared obsession with asian dried prunes as snacks. They can be dried prunes, olives, anything. They can be sweet or salty or even a little bit of both.  One of our favorites is this - it's a dried prune that is a bright brick red, salty and is delicious on its own, added to tomatoes, watermelon, mango or even drop a prune in a glass of Sprite.  For the tomatoes, cut the top hole out (basically the stem part you'd cut out anyways) making sure not to cut it all the way through.  Then you push one of these prunes down into the middle of the tomato - best with a very juicy large tomato (no romas) - and let it sit for a day.  Then you can just eat the tomato starting from the top and you get this delicious, salted, very flavorful tomato and juices.  You can find a variety in most Asian grocery stores.  Also, you can find dried prune powder - ooofffh! Sprinkle some on top of watermelon....so good.

So why hadn't we thought to use it with peaches until just a few years ago? I don't know but I'm so happy now!  These peaches are best if they are small and very hard.  Once you marinate these, they can get soft fairly quickly - but that's okay, because its so good, they are usually gone within the first few days.

Asian marinated peaches

6-8 asian, salted dried prunes, red version

4 tablespoons of asian, salted dried prune powder
2 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
8-12 small, very firm/hard peaches (soft ones will get too mushy after a few days)

1. Wash your peaches and bring a bit pot of water to a boil.  Once boiling, add in the peaches and let it cook for roughly 30 seconds. Very quick. Goal here is to get rid of that fuzzy outer layer or anything that is on the skin - prep so peaches have best absorbing/marinating power.

2. Transfer the peaches to a large ziploc bag and add in the sugar, salt, dried prunes and the powder.  Without closing the bag, roll the peaches/bag around so that it is incorporated and mixed well.  Taste and if it needs more powder or sugar, you can add.

3. Let it sit out on the counter with the bag OPEN to let the steam from the peaches out.  This is critical because you don't want to trap extra condensation from the heat of the boiled peaches and then get mushy peaches.  Once cool, zip it up and lay it on its side in the fridge for at least a day.  Putting it on its side is important so each peach can sitting in the juices created by the mix of peach juice, prunes and sugar  It will be good to rolls these around throughout the day so that all sides can absorb the flavors.  Peaches will start turning a pale red and start absorbing the yummy juices.  Just try and only eat one.  I dare you.