Heat. It’s a pretty incredible thing when you really think about it. The things it can do; to make things better or taste worse. Slowly or over quick, hot flame.  A caramel sauce that goes from perfectly golden brown to bitter and black in two seconds. The difference between searing a piece of meat in a pan and boiling it to death in its own watery juices. How changing the temperature just a couple of degrees in either direction with make a glass of wine dull and boring one minute and deep, complex and delicious the next. Getting the right temper on chocolate so that it snaps instead of bends and melts in your fingers. Or if your oven is too high and the outside of your bread bakes and sets long before the inside is cooked. Having an ingredient, or a room at the wrong temperature can spell disaster, and the opposite complete triumph. Having something too hot can make you not want to step foot in the kitchen to cook food, too.

As was the case this summer, here in what turned out to be a dry, arid, scorching Colorado. I didn’t cook much over the past few months, and what I did was usually limited to one burner or my toaster oven. Funny thing about that kind of heat is that all you really want to do is drink TONS of cold water and eat popsicles anyway. The thought of piping hot food does not entice. And perhaps what ‘they’ say is true, that you’ll actually cool down if you eat and drink warm things, but you have to start SWEATING in order for that complete cycle to work, and that just makes you want to take a cold shower, so I say just eat the cold thing and be done with it.

I made a pie the other day-Peach, with to-die-for Palisade Peaches (one good thing about a hot summer this year, was some of the best damn peaches I’ve ever had). I set out the butter for the crust to warm up a little while I peeled all those fleshy orange and red orbs. Apparently it took me too long to do it, because by the time I was ready to make the crust the butter had become too soft, too warm in my small 100yr old, top floor, south-facing apartment.  A colder butter/fat in your crust creates a flakier pastry, warmer fat and you get a crumblier pastry. I like mine flaky. Instead I got a dough more reminiscent of short bread than pie crust. It’s kind of amazing how the same ingredients can turn into so many different things. Change the order in which they’re added, or the temperature of them and shazam! totally new food. Normally I would have stopped to chill the butter back down, but I was in a time crunch and had already promised someone a slice for the next day.