As I dive into this new realm of cooking, I have found that my shortcomings consist of not exactly knowing how to prepare food. Honestly, the entire premise of this blog is my misadventures in cooking, preparation included. For example, I struggle with cutting onions. I know that sounds crazy, but I’ve yet to sink my knife into an onion and it be chopped or diced the way that I had imagined it would be. Not to mention the countless tears, that are hurriedly dried up by paper towels as I frantically try to regain my vision. Apparently, cutting onions is an art. So much so that Chef Gordon Ramsay had contestants on Hell’s Kitchen compete against each other in onion cutting. If there were big chunks and the onions were not perfectly chopped, then they were disqualified. I can’t believe in all of the inter webs that I can’t find the hilarity that is 20 people cutting onions and weeping as the onion mist gets into their eyes. Every time I chop onions, I think of this and laugh, then wipe my eyes with the paper towel.

Anyway, so back to the stone fruit. Never have I ever in my life eaten a peach or a nectarine off of the pit, unless someone else did it for me. Think, Del Monte packaged fruit cups. If I were to eat a peach or a nectarine, I would just eat it like I would an apple and carve my teeth around the stone. I’ve certainly never needed to bake said stone fruit, so this was an exciting recipe that I couldn’t wait to try out.

So far, my journey in the AIP has been me spending much of my time hangry. I can no longer have the healthy snacks that I would usually reach for when I’m hungry, so I’ve really missed snacking. I was eating every couple of hours before AIP, and there is a bit of a pitty party that occurs when you go to your homemade trail mix and realize you can’t eat it. Enough was enough. I was going to prepare to be successful in the AIP. I was going to plan for SNACKS. This recipe conveniently was in the back of the Autoimmune Wellness Handbook* so I didn’t have to look too far for snack ideas.

Luckily, I already had the ingredients except for the peaches and nectarines so it was a no-brainer that I needed to try this snack. I just had to figure out how to remove the pit. I first went in and cut it from top to bottom, kind of like how I cut avocados. I’ll cut stem to bottom then twist and it comes apart like butter. Not so much with peaches and nectarines, especially firm peaches and nectarines. I decided to make another cut horizontally around the peach, intersecting my previous stem to bottom cut. Then tried pulling the fruit away from the stone. It was slippery, and wet, and all I ended up doing was peeling the skin off of the fruit, so I opted to just cut around the stone. I ended up wasting a ton of fruit meat.

I modified the above technique and first started with a horizontal cut around the fruit, then cut it into individual sections, and pulled each section away from the stone. This may seem like common sense to anyone who has cut stone fruit before, but due to my lack of experience, I just had to figure it out by trial and error. And honestly, I’m not entirely sure how it’s different from the first attempt, but for some reason cutting each section and removing them individually as quarters instead of halves worked great.

You can see the tattered remnants of the fruit next to the beautifully quartered fruit once I figured out how to remove the pit. I’m so proud of myself…. now I need to learn how to cut mango. I’ve never been good at that. Any suggestions?

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