December 2, 2009: Juicy summer fruits

I have not been a good calendar cooker this last month - it's taken me until the first couple of days of December to prepare November's recipe! Initially I put it off because I hadn't seen any nice summer stone fruits about, then things got wildly sociable and there wasn't much home cooking or fruit buying going on.

What was worse than my tardiness was my inability to follow a simple recipe. Skewer fruit, coat fruit with melted butter and sugar, fry and eat - how hard can it be? Well, if it's undertaken in the latter hours of a weeknight, that's challenge enough. Brushing melted butter onto the fruit shish-kebabs was a little messy but rolling them in sugar was much, much worse. Things reached crisis point when I realised that my skewers were too long to fit in the frypan. Argh! I de-skewered the fruit into the pan, chucked in the remaining butter and sugar, and let it all bubble away for a few minutes while I calmed the heck down. When the fruit was tender I transferred it to bowls, and gave the sauce a minute more to reduce. Once the sauce was done it was into the bowls too, followed by a scoop of icecream. It wasn't shish-kebabs, but it was tasty.


Fruit shish-kebabs (or fruit shish-kerfuffle)

2 peaches
2 apricots
8 strawberries
30g butter, melted
1/3 cup raw sugar
vanilla ice cream, to serve

The official method: Slice up the fruit and slide the pieces onto skewers. Preheat a frypan (big enough for the skewers to fit inside!). Brush the fruit skewers with melted butter, then roll them in the sugar. Cook them for 5 minutes on each side, then serve them warm with icecream.

The late-and-lazy method: Preheat a frypan and melt the butter in it. Slice up the fruit and add it to the pan; sprinkle over the sugar. Cook the fruit, stirring occasionally, until tender. Remove the fruit into serving bowls and cook the juices down to a thicker sauce. Pour the juices over the fruit. Served topped with icecream.