Peaches and Dinner

I had put a post up on facebook the other day for peach recipes because my mom and dad went peach picking the other week.   When (and why) they went, there was a deal that they got a container and could overfill it and paid a set price no matter the weight of the peaches.   You could overfill it as high as you wanted, it just had to all be in there.   Anyways, I took a couple dozen off their hands, and was gonna make a peach pie last week, but hadn't had the time to pull a recipe and buy the other ingredients.   Although I put the post up, I also looked up recipes on cooking light and found a couple - one for an entree and one for a side salad - that we had all the ingredients (at least the ones I wanted) for and were good options if I didn't get any other ideas.  

I did get one more idea from my friend Abbye for a Nectarine Galette (substituting peaches in of course).   I had all the ingredients for this, so I was gonna make this and the entree and skip the peach side.

For the galette - unfortunately the pie crust I had was all dried out, and even with the attempts I made at salvaging it, I wasn't gonna have any luck, so I skipped that idea and went back to the side salad.

On to our dinner, I made Peach-Glazed Barbecue Chicken Breasts (recipe calls for pork chops, but i don't eat pork).   I didn't grill the peaches because most of the peaches were too ripe for grilling, I just followed the rest of the recipe.   We only marinated it for 30 minutes, and it ended up being really good.   If we had time to marinate it longer, I can only imagine how much more flavor it would have had.

The side salad was for a Summer Peach and Tomato Salad.   We had a couple tomatoes in the house because we had just seen Adam's aunts and one of them has a vegetable garden and gave us a couple tomatoes.   They were so yummy and juicy!   I did a bunch of modifications for this:  

• I like cooked onions, but not really raw onions, because they just leave that flavor in your mouth for like 24 hours, so I skipped that (and we didn't have onions, so that was another reason to skip it).   
• I only used the 2 homegrown tomatoes we had, didn't go and buy and cherry or pear tomatoes (although that would have made it look prettier).
• I didn't have sherry vinegar, just sherry cooking wine and red wine vinegar, so I figured red wine vinegar would be the better substitute
• I added in fig balsamic vinegar because I thought that would be a nice addition (it was - but I think any balsamic vinegar would do the trick)
• I skipped the feta cheese because we were having this with chicken and I keep a (semi) kosher kitchen
• I didn't have fresh basil, so I used some of the dried basil, making sure I rubbed it to bring out the flavors.

With all those modifications, it was still a great side salad, and I can't wait to go home and eat some of the leftovers!

With that we had a successful dinner portion of our date night on Monday night.   The rest of the night wasn't so great - but that's for another time...