Stone Fruit

When fresh peaches are in season and ripe, this is a wonderful way to serve them.

This old-time dessert is still a favorite today. It’s really a streusel apple pie baked without a crust.

This special dessert is so good—and so much fun to prepare and serve—I hope you’ll be persuaded to make and keep scrippelle (crêpes) on hand all the time, as they do in the kitchens of Abruzzo. Here, you slice the scrippelle into strips (they look like fresh fettuccine!) and toss them in a hot caramel, apricot, and citrus sauce that you’ve got bubbling in a skillet. Serve the beautifully glazed ribbons still warm, with whipped cream melting on top. This recipe calls for a full batch of the thin pancakes (the same ones used for the savory Crespelle with Spinach, page 234), but it is easy to adjust the amounts to make a larger or smaller dessert. Even if you have only a couple of extra scrippelle in your freezer, you can still transform them, with this basic technique, into a treat for two. Let your creativity loose: Just like pasta, scrippelle ribbons can be dressed for dessert in countless ways. Add rum or liqueur to this caramel sauce, or vary it with other fruit preserves or juices. Shape the ribbons into a little nest for a scoop of ice cream. Or drizzle melted chocolate over the warm ribbons, sprinkle with chopped toasted hazelnuts, and top with a dollop of whipped cream.

In the culinary world today, dishes with whole grains are “in,” but they have always been part of Italian regional cuisine, even as desserts. Put together from whatever grains and nuts were in the house, and minimally sweetened with available fruit, traditional desserts like this wheat-berry ambrosia are among my favorites. In that spirit, this recipe can be a guideline for your own creativity. This is a versatile and practical dessert, too. Prepare the mixture of wheat berries, dried fruit, and chocolate in advance, and refrigerate it. Let it return to room temperature before serving (though it is nice slightly chilled in summer). It’s also great for a buffet with whipped cream or scoops of vanilla or chocolate ice cream on top.

My friend Mario Piccozzi and I discovered this deluxe version of bread pudding on a winter visit to Merano, the historic resort town in the middle of the Alps, in Alto Adige. It was the perfect dessert on a cold day, served in its baking dish, still warm from the oven. Spooning the pudding onto plates, I was thrilled to find it loaded with apple chunks and walnuts, oozing rich custard and bubbling apricot jam. I make this at home now (it’s very easy) and serve it just as they do in Merano, family-style, setting the steaming, gold-topped pudding in the middle of the table, with a serving spoon and lots of plates. It disappears fast.

One rule of thumb governing utensil purchases is to consider the cost of the item in relation to how often you'll use it. Since cherry season is so short, a pitter scores pretty low on the price-use ratio. But the formula is badly flawed, not taking into account how this gadget affects your life when you put it to use. By that reckoning, if owning a cherry pitter moved you to make this soup just once a year, it'd be worth the ten dollars or so you can expect to pay for it.

This Moroccan-style braise is deeply aromatic, meltingly tender, and exactly what you want on a chilly winter weekend.

Inspired by a recipe from chef Kaori Endo of Nanashi in Paris, this smart, easy dessert shows how well matcha plays with creamy yogurt and fruit.

Texas is proud of its peaches. They're soft, juicy, floral, and sweet, and the best I've ever tasted. During the season, when you travel through lush Hill Country Texas towns such as Fredericksburg, or Central Texas towns such as Fairfield, you won't be able to go a mile without seeing a roadside stand or pickup truck filled with baskets of this cherished summertime treat. We also have a peach tree at my grandma's North Texas farm, and every July it delivers a bounty of peaches that she'll put up for later in the year. Pickling fruit is a common method of fruit preservation in Texas. Yes, there's vinegar involved, as with other types of pickles. But you also add enough sugar and warm spices to give the fruit a balance of both acidity and sweetness. If you've never tried pickled fruit, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Pickled peaches are perhaps my favorite fruit to preserve, as I love how the peaches' sweet juice combines with the piquant brine. Of course, I've added a bit of heat to my peaches, which is decidedly not traditional, but I find that the habanero's flowery notes go very well with the peaches' floral tones. These go well with a bowl of ice cream, on top of your morning oatmeal, with a freshly baked biscuit, or yes, simply eaten straight out of the jar.

These skillet-fried biscuits are a little sturdier than many other biscuits in order to hold the fresh berries intact. The butter bumps up the flavor as well. When they are fried, they remind me of the blueberries we picked early one morning as Girl Scouts and made into pancakes—a culinary highlight of my childhood. But they are very special baked as well. Either way, they’re a winner.

A frosty glass of refreshing iced tea is the inspiration for this sorbet. Iced tea flavored with peaches has nearly outpaced tea with lemon in recent years. Bottles of tasty peach tea are available in most stores, but you can also brew your own with peach tea bags. If you use bottled tea in this recipe, make sure it isn't diet. This sorbet is a good way to use peaches so dead-ripe that they cannot be eaten whole or sliced because any small brown soft spots disappear into the tea. The vodka improves the texture of the sorbet, as does the corn syrup. Use tea-flavored vodka if you have it, although plain vodka works fine. Pouring a splash of the sweet tea vodka or bourbon over the soft sorbet makes an excellent slushy for grown-ups.

When it comes to nutrition, cherries don't bomb. They're rich in anthocyanins, which can jump-start your immune system and mop up free radicals.

What a plum deal: Certain molecules in purple produce may help fend off Parkinson's disease by preventing the production of disease-causing toxins.

THE GOODS Boasting 36 percent of your RDA for potassium, this fruity, chocolaty breakfast blend is a big-time bloat buster with only 276 calories per serving.

Earl Grey tea gives these easy preserves a subtle floral note.

West's friend Valerie Gordon, of Valerie Confections, created this cakelike dessert using both fresh and preserved peaches.

Editor's note: Use these roasted cherries to make Jeni Britton Bauer's Goat Cheese Ice Cream with Roasted Red Cherries . Roasting cherries concentrates the flavors and natural fruit sugars. Roasted cherries are great for putting in ice cream, for adding on top of it while serving, or even in a pie à la mode sundae.

Sweet-tart roasted Michigan cherries are balanced by pure, tangy goat cheese. Like a cherry cheesecake, but better. Goat Cheese Ice Cream pairs with many fruits, but we make it two ways: roasted red cherries go into our spring and summer versions, and in the fall we switch to Cognac figs. The cherry or fig compote can also be served on top of the ice cream, rather than layered into it. The combination of these flavors reminds me of the center of a cheese Danish. Roasted red cherries burst with concentrated sweet cherry flavor. As for the goat cheese, find a fresh, locally prepared cheese if you can; it will be the most flavorful and have the cleanest finish. Jean Mackenzie, who supplies out goat cheese, makes some of the best I have ever had. Pairs well with: Chocolate. Ice wine. Toasted hazelnuts.