Summer Stone Fruit Biscuit Cobbler

This morning marks the third time in two weeks that I find myself in the kitchen, fruit juice dripping down my arms, elbows deep in a bowl of peaches and cherries, paring them with a knife against my thumb and tossing the juicy fruit bits into a baking pan so they can become this cobbler. If there’s a recipe I want to share with you right now, it’s this one.

I’m overdosing hard on fruits these days. This is the moment here in Colorado when all of our bounty starts to arrive – apricots, peaches, cherries in all varieties. I live for these days and if I’m honest I hoard fruit in a completely irresponsible way. For everything else in my life – clothing, material objects, relationships – I curate the living sh*t out of my world. But when it comes to fruit, I’m a complete slut and I let everyone in – all the varieties, in obscene quantities – even when I’m already full up.

Such behavior necessitates strategy. The first being that anyone that comes near the house is likely to go home with a couple peaches in their pockets. The new postman, the kind gents who delivered furniture and a new range to the house last week left cradling cherries in their weathered hands. I grill the fruits and toss them into salads, chop them up for breakfast porridge, and make this very easy, shortcake-inspired cobbler.

Stating the (hopefully) obvious.

This week, many of you have asked questions about how to train for races, how to fuel your workouts, how to feed your bodies for adventure. I’ll get to those questions, but for this hot moment I want to direct your attention to the way you feed your soul all of the time (not just when you’re *working out.*)

You don’t need a single excuse or reason to make a sultry summer dessert like this. You don’t need a reason to make dessert anytime, but especially right now. Mother Nature is literally flinging sweet, sexy, juicy fruits at us and it is absolutely our job to enjoy them. Our bodies want it. – especially if we’ve been pushing hard. Our bodies need the sweet nectar from this bounty.

Our souls want it. They deserve the deep satisfaction that comes from smelling these beauties baking, then spooning it into our mouths as the sun is setting – or rising – whatever you prefer.

Our spirits want it. They want to store up these drippy-juice memories for the depths of winter.

Making something soulful like this cobbler is all the things that make us human, connect us deeper to our bodies, to nature, to our experience. And if you’re starting to circle back to how that will help you perform better in all areas of your life, the answer is that ABSOLUTELY, IT WILL. BEYOND MEASURE.

Picking the BEST fruit

When I was eagerly waiting in line for my haul of peaches last weekend, the woman behind me whispered in my ear and asked if the juice was worth the squeeze (literally, was waiting in the quickly forming, daunting line behind us worth it.) I spun around quickly, stared her straight in the eye and said WITHOUT QUESTION. I hope I didn’t actually yell this in her face…because that is the amount of enthusiasm that I meant to share.

Buying seasonal fruits, where you live, is WORTH IT. The expense, the time, and the effort altogether. Why?

• Better flavor. Truly. Commercial fruits that are picked in one state and shipped to another are plucked from their trees many days before they’re ripe, so they can make it to consumers when they’re almost ripe. This explains why sometimes you get very hard peaches or very tart cherries — those last days of ripening critical for developing flavor are missed by these little fruits. Fruits picked and sold locally can be picked on THE DAY they’re ready.
• Greater nutrition. Actually. Commercial fruits also are less nutritious than locally harvested fruits. For every moment that these fruits are no longer connected to the umbilical cord of nutrition on the tree, they start to lose potency. The further your fruit has traveled, the more time it’s spent off the drip, the less nutritious.
• In tune. Eating seasonal fruit in your community is the best way to stay connected to nature where YOU live. Being connected in this way helps with seasonal allergies, acclimation, sleep patterns and more. Being in tune with the location that your grapes came from (Peru?) or your kiwis (New Zealand) does you little good, to be honest.