I never wanted this to become one of those Cooking Blogs…

You know, the ones that you find when you’re bored and clicking the StumbleUpon button on your browser, the ones that never fail to make you hungry with their glorious pictures and simple recipies.

Then I started tinkering with French Toast on those delightful days when I didn’t need to just choke down some boring old scrambled eggs and get out the door for work, and today, my last breakfast in my parents’ kitchen for a good couple months, I hit on something that I couldn’t not share.

The freedom of my parents’ kitchen makes me crazy, a mad scientist of foods and flavors, or at least, that’s what I was thinking when I decided to dice up a peach into tiny little pieces like an onion and throw them into the eggs, or make french toast in Strawberry Shortcake shells.

I’ve always preferred fruity to maple syrup when topping pancakes, waffles, french toast, etc. There was a phase where I would eat my waffles with a cup of jelly for dipping, and of course, if I found myself at an IHOP or anything like that, the maple syrup was at the bottom of my list. So, when some peaches ripened on the counter, I just had to use one.

The strawberry shortcake shells, though largely the product of sheer, unadulterated madness, also find roots in an earlier bout of French Toast experimentation, when I made FT out of Banana Bread, and “Beer Bread”, an odd souvenir from Maine. Both proved to be interesting spins on French Toast at a very fundamental level; they changed the very texture of the dish, it was so much more than just French Toasted pre-sliced bread, it was rich and exciting and new. Then my dad one-upped me by throwing a few of the previous evening’s biscuits in the batter I had left. The seeds of madness were planted. So, when I could frak around a bit, and we had the shells left, I had to go with them, and I was pleasantly surprised by just how good they ended up: Far richer and heavier than simple bread, with a little bit of sweetness to them, plus they looked like no French Toast I’d ever seen, but like…something familiar that I can’t quite put my finger on.

FRENCH TOASTED SHORTCAKE WITH PEACHES

Ingredients

• Strawberry Shortcake Shells (or bread)
• Eggs: I’d recommend about 2 large eggs per three slices of toast
• Ripe Peach: one covered three slices of French Toast
• Milk: ca. 1/3 cup
• Nutmeg
• Cinnamon
• Cognac: Less than a shot should do.
• Butter

• Frying Pan
• Spatula
• Cutting Board
• Knife

Instructions:

1. Slice your peach(es) into very small pieces, like you were dicing garlic or an onion. The smaller the pieces, the more mileage you’ll get out of them, which will allow you to do some crazy things, like mixing some with the egg mixture to get the French Toast nice and peachy.
2. In the bowl, beat together the eggs, milk, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cognac. Start with just the eggs, and mix them until they’re mostly a uniform yellow liquid, then add the rest. If you’re feeling really fancy, add about 1/3 of your diced peaches. If you do add the peaches, you’ll probably have to be a little creative with getting them to actually stick to your bread, but I’ll cover that when I get to actually cooking it in a step or two.
3. Set a piece of bread (or a Shortcake Shell) in the egg mixture, and cover both sides of the bread with egg mixture. The egg mixture should be rather thick on the bread, so you may need to flip it a couple times. When you’re done, the egg mixture should drip off when you pick the bread up.
4. Put some butter in your frying pan, and turn the burner on. Once the butter is melted, carefully transfer the bread from the egg mixture to the frying pan. If you added peaches to the egg mixture, you may want  to spoon some from the mixture right onto the bread as it’s cooking, since there were probably only a few peaches that stuck to it.
5. Press down on the bread with your spatula to make sure that it all contacts the frying pan equally. We don’t want any spots of raw egg. This is especially vital with the shortcake shells (don’t press those flat before starting to cook them, or they’ll fall apart), because the deep hole will never get cooked unless you press it down. It should look kind of like a pancake. Pressing is also a good way to get any additional peach-filled batter you’ve added to stick to the bread.
6. After a couple seconds, flip the bread and repeat step 5 (and add some extra egg-and-peach mixture to the top of the bread, if you’re trying to get extra peachy French Toast). After a couple more seconds flip it again. Keep flipping and pressing until the French Toast is golden brown on both sides (I suppose you could just let it cook longer and flip it fewer times, but I’m very paranoid about burning my food, so I tend to get overanxious and flip things many times).
7. Once the French Toast is golden brown, transfer it from the frying pan to a plate. When all the French Toast is done, pour your remaining peaches on top of it (only peaches that haven’t gone into the batter. Raw eggs tend not to agree with people). Then, grab a fork and a glass of milk (or perhaps a cup of coffee), and dig in.