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Upon realizing that we need to include more vegetables and fruits in our diet to keep future medical expenses down, I went onto Safeway’s website, entered our zip-code, pulled the “produce” menu and cross-referenced it with the state list of produce currently in season (see here) (*). Here I found some peaches for $0.99/lbs and wrote an email to DW to pick some up on her way home.

(*) If you don’t believe that fuel costs are going to be a future problem or a current problem, these is no need to take the latter step into account.

Next, I had to find a recipe. I googled and found this one and this one. Now, these contain a lot of ingredients that I don’t have, and a few ingredients that could be substituted. It was evident from the recipes though that the working ingredients were the peaches (duh!), vinegar, brown sugar, and some kind of onion.

I hacked up the $2.25 worth of peaches and put them into the deep cast iron skillet, which is rapidly becoming my favorite pot (after the pressure cooker). I then reached into the cupboard for some raisins. Unfortunately I was out, having just ate the last ones two hours ago. No harm, raisins are not crucial.

Unfortunately we did not have any apple cider vinegar. I was hoping that we had some red wine vinegar to substitute, but no. However, there was some rice vinegar. Having no idea of its strength or the purpose of having this rice vinegar in the first place, I just dumped enough in to allow the peaches to simmer. I figured I could crush some garlics in, but I was too lazy to cut up an onion. I didn’t have any ginger except in powder form. That worked well. Then I remember the brown sugar and dug into the cupboard. Fortunately, we did have brown sugar (there’s an affinity for baking in this house). I found two bags, one almost empty, so I dumped the remainder into the peaches creating some more cupboard space in the process. Finally I added some chili flakes from the freezer; we got a (too) big box at Sam’s Club three years ago.

Served with (pressure cooked) rice and some leftover dhal from a couple of days ago. There’s enough leftovers for tomorrow.

Much thanks to PS for the donation!

Originally posted 2008-07-04 07:24:28.