Roasted Peaches with Glazed Sesame Oats

It’s no secret that one of our favourite market vendors is Bizjak Farms. I’ve written about their wonderful stone fruit before. Still, the quality varies from year to year, even week to week. A recent haul of peaches from the Wychwood Barns Farmers’ Market left us underwhelmed, owing to one basket’s mealy texture. However, a 20-minute roast transformed the lacklustre fruit into something much tastier.

The recipe comes from Seven Spoons, a cookbook by Tara O’Brady. At its core, the basic idea of this recipe is roasted peaches and granola atop yogurt. And it’s easy to adapt to other fruit, different diary (maybe ricotta or quark), and even store-bought oat cereal. But when the headnote of this recipe describes the oats as being coated in a “sesame seed-studded shellac”, I couldn’t resist making O’Brady’s version.

I used a toaster oven for the fruit, and was thrilled that roasting my mediocre peaches made them more delicious, with a yielding texture that wasn’t mushy. I skipped the five-spice powder on the fruit, in deference to my wife and daughter, who aren’t fans of it. One bonus was that the skins were easy to slip off the peach halves. The granola had a wonderful sesame flavour, and had just the right amount of sweet from the maple syrup and brown sugar. It held in an airtight container for a week.

Highly recommended for breakfast, post-lunch dessert, or midnight snack!