Week 25 - Stone Fruits

I wasn't particularly looking forward to Week 25 of the 52 week challenge. The theme was stone fruits which I like as a general matter (happy it's pluot season again!), but I wasn't very excited about cooking with them. The theme presented a few issues: (1) I am really not a fan of mixing fruit into savory dishes, (2) I could make dessert with stone fruits, but I prefer making dinner items for the challenge, and (3) I wasn't inspired by any challenge meals I saw using stone fruit. (As a side note to anyone following along, I didn't forget to post Week 24. I went out of order and didn't do it yet.)

After much thought, I finally found something that I thought I could be satisfied with - a fish taco topped with homemade peach salsa. (We all know I love tacos...) The version of peach salsa at Natasha's Kitchen looked good, so I decided to do an adaptation of that. Other than peaches and peppers, I really didn't want to buy any other new ingredients this week so I tried to work with what we had at home instead.

In my adaptation of the recipe, I used:

- 14.5 oz can of diced tomatoes with green chiles, drained ($0.78)

- 1 red bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped ($0.99)

- 1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and finely chopped ($0.15)

- 1 medium red onion, finely chopped ($0.50)

- 24 oz jar of sliced peaches in light syrup, drained ($2.35)

- 4 cubes of frozen chopped cilantro ($0.40)

- 4 garlic cloves, minced ($0.08)

- 2 spoonfuls of lime juice ($0.40)

- 1.5 tsp salt ($0.05)

- 1 tsp black pepper ($0.05)

I would have preferred to use fresh cilantro (and would have used approximately 1/2 a bunch), but I didn't want the rest to go to waste during our short cooking week this week. I don't really think fresh cilantro and the frozen cubes are comparable, but the frozen stuff will do in a pinch.

The recipe came out to about $5.75 for a giant bowl of peach salsa, but we only ate about 1/2 of it for dinner. The entire meal (with tortillas and fish), counting only the peach salsa we ate, was probably $6 or so, which was a great price for a dinner for 2. Of course, for dessert, we ate an entire box of Costco blackberries, which cost about the same thing, so in the end, the night as a whole wasn't that cheap!

Making the peach salsa is pretty easy. First, you have to prep all the ingredients (chop the peaches, pepper, onion, jalapeño, cilantro, and garlic) and throw them all into a bowl together with the canned tomatoes. Then add the lime juice, salt and pepper. Stir thoroughly until it's all mixed well. Let it sit for a bit to meld together (I didn't chill it because we were eating it within the hour, but I suppose you could do that). Done!

For our first plates, we each made a fish taco with the tortillas, a couple of fish sticks, and a few generous spoonfuls of peach salsa. After that, it was just fish sticks topped with salsa. Both ways were good. Fish sticks work quite well with this salsa.

The peach salsa wasn't exactly what we were expecting it to be. I had thought that it was going to be really sweet since I was using an entire jar of peaches in syrup (even though the syrup was drained). As A noted when I had him try one, the peaches in these jars aren't as sweet as the canned or jarred peaches you usually get, which helped a lot with the salsa. Also, the sweetness of the peaches was offset by the sharpness of the red onion. I guess the onion I used was a little big, since there was a ton of onion in the salsa. Not a bad thing, but it did make it a bit sharp. There was also a little bit of a kick to the salsa from the jalapeño that we liked. Overall, it was a successful challenge dish.

Would I make this again? Maybe. It seems easier to just make a regular pico de gallo without fruit to put on tacos, but if we're ever in the mood for peach salsa, at least we've got a good recipe to use!