OPB’s “Superabundant” explores the stories behind the foods of the Pacific Northwest with videos, articles and this weekly newsletter. Every week, Heather Arndt Anderson, a Portland-based culinary historian, food writer and ecologist, highlights different aspects of the region’s food ecosystem. This week she offers a recipe for grilled peach and chicken flatbread pizzas.

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There has been a LOT of news over the past week, but it’s almost all too awful to mention, so forgive us, we’ll be over here eating our feelings. If you, too, like a little salt with your summer fruit (pass the Tajín-ed up watermelon!), you’re in luck, because the fruits are just getting started. A good year had been predicted for cherries, but it looks like other stone fruits are loving all the warm weather too. Peaches, apricots, sweet plums and nectarines have never been more luscious — but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t taste even better with salty tears sprinkled on top. If you’re all cried out, remember — you always have a friend (or a coping strategy, depending,) in cheese. This week’s recipe is a celebration of unconventional pairings held in harmony by the ephemerality of their parts, and it was inspired by a chef who made her own rules and played by them impeccably.

Saying goodbye to a local icon, bivalves back to business, a delicious decade of crop collabs, a new whey to mine for gold and good things in markets, gardens and kitchens

Portland food community shattered by death of Naomi Pomeroy

The James Beard Award-winning chef and owner of much-lauded restaurant Beast drowned in a tragic inner tube accident on the Willamette River near Corvallis last weekend. Friends, family and fans are still reeling from the news, but small, impromptu celebrations of her life have been popping up around Portland. To chef Pomeroy, we raise a glass.

Mussel harvest reopens along northern coast

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has announced that mussels are once again safe for harvest in the northern stretches of the Oregon Coast between the Washington border and Cape Lookout.

Culinary Breeding Network’s Variety Showcase turns 10!

The event that’s been bringing farmers, chefs, plant breeders, and heirloom vegetable nerds together from around the world is celebrating its 10th anniversary at the Redd on Salmon Street in Portland this September. Brought to you by the Culinary Breeding Network, the Variety Showcase features the latest in new crop development, with an opportunity to taste everything. Tickets are available here.

Better than Cougar Gold? Literal gold

Whey is one of those dairy by-products that always seems to need a rebrand. What are cheesemakers supposed to do with it all? Though you can technically eke a little more cheese out of whey, scientists at the engineering and tech university ETH Zürich have discovered a way to turn denatured proteins in whey (the liquid left behind during cheesemaking) into a sponge to use as a matrix for collecting gold stripped from e-waste. (Oregon State University’s process of turning whey into distilled spirits is pretty cool too, though.)

Good things in markets

Stone fruits are trickling in, and they are an absolute vision of jewel-toned pulchritude. The dry weather concentrates the fruits’ sugars over the past few weeks, and now Hood River’s family orchards like Kiyokawa and Baird are pulling in July’s finest — look for sour Montmorency pie cherries, ultra-sweet Honey Blaze nectarines and fragrant Robada apricots.

In “too-good-to-be-true” news, last week a Reddit user in New Jersey noticed her local supermarket was having a sale on Matiz brand wild-caught Spanish sardines. The price had been originally marked $1.29 per tin which, considering the usual price for these tiny fish runs anywhere from $4 to $13 per tin (depending on where you shop), this was already the deal of a lifetime. This sale price? A rock-bottom 86 cents per tin. The heroic Reddit user did the only reasonable thing and bought every single can in the store.

Here’s where the story gets very hinky, though: While browsing local grocery stores’ online shopping sites to compare prices, we noticed that none offered in-store pickup for Matiz sardines. Cases can be purchased through Amazon or Walmart but if the stores’ websites are correct, the product has been removed from shelves. (A call to the Laurelhurst Whole Foods confirmed that the sardines had all been pulled from that location and are no longer available, though the store manager couldn’t say why.) This story is still developing; watch this space for updates.

In the “Superabundant” garden this week

The season’s first peaches are deepening in color (and heavy enough that their branches are draping over the driveway) so we had to sample one early — though they’re still slightly crunchy, the sugar and flavor are already miles beyond anything being shipped up from California. We also picked a few early specimens from the brown turkey fig’s breba crop, but the figs’ impressively large size betrayed their lack of flavor.

Sad news for our blackberry crop: spotted wing drosophila has entered the chat. We found a few larvae in the loganberries we harvested last week and have culled about half of the fruit to limit the spread. Though there’s likely not any health risk by ingesting fruit fly eggs larvae, it really ruins the summer fruit idyll to have to skim off tiny maggots while simmering jam.

Lately, in the “Superabundant” kitchen

✨We’ve been enjoying bean purees of every persuasion — creamy mayocobas mashed with lots of garlic, cumin and chile to eat with tortilla chips; lemony hummus spiked with sumac we foraged last fall for dipping pitas and sliced vegetables; and toasted baguette smeared with cannellini beans cooked to oblivion and topped with sage blossoms, crunchy sea salt and tons of olive oil.

✨We used some restaurant leftovers from Stammtisch (most of a Schweinshaxe and braised red cabbage) and Jeju (various ssam meats, kimchi and sliced radishes) to throw a nonconsensual collab dinner — it turns out that even from completely different places, pork and crucifers taste good together, especially with more beans (this time, beautiful Tiger’s Eye).

✨ There was a quickie meal of soba tossed with frozen, shelled edamame (which thaw in the heat of the cooked noodles), a squirt of store-bought soba soup base, a drizzle of sesame oil and some sliced scallions. Lukewarm or cold, it’s one of our favorite ways to slurp noodles.

Recipe: Grilled peach and chicken flatbread pizzas

Remember when grilled pizza had kind of a moment 10 years ago? Before every dough head had an Ooni in their backyard, we plebes were out here making our summer pizzas on *actual grills.* Did the dough get stuck and burn a little (or more than a little)? Absolutely. But did those slightly charred pizzas taste like a triumph? You better believe it.

You can certainly make your own dough for this, but since you’ll already be grilling the peaches and chicken, you may as well make it easy on yourself and use a pre-made flatbread like naan or a fluffy Greek pita — it’ll only be on the grill long enough to get toasty and melt the cheese. (Of course, you can still make the flatbread yourself if that’s how you roll.)

We find that with ripe peaches, the best cheese pairings are going to be at the opposite ends of the pungency spectrum — we either want to go hard with a smoky blue or stinky Époisses, or we’ll play it subtle with a mild and creamy mascarpone or burrata. Your mileage may vary! Makes 8 flatbread pizzas

Ingredients

1 pound skinless boneless chicken breast

Salt and pepper

½ teaspoon paprika

½ teaspoon onion powder

½ teaspoon garlic powder

2 ripe peaches or nectarines, pitted and sliced into inch-thick wedges

Olive oil

8 naan or Greek pita

8 ounces soft or semi-soft cheese, grated, sliced or torn into bite-size pieces

Fresh thyme and/or parsley for garnish

Instructions

1. Butterfly the chicken breast and then pound it into a flat paillard using a meat mallet or rolling pin to about ½ inch thick. Sprinkle both sides with a generous pinch of salt and pepper, the paprika, onion powder and garlic powder and a drizzle of olive oil.
2. Drizzle the sliced peaches with olive oil and sprinkle with a pinch of salt and pepper.
3. Heat your grill to medium-high, then brush the cooking surface with oil. Grill the chicken until cooked through and charred on the edges, about 3 minutes on each side. Set aside to rest.
4. Grill the peaches until grill marks form and the edges are caramelized, about 1 minute on each side.
5. Slice the grilled chicken into bite-sized pieces, then arrange on the flatbreads with the grilled peaches and cheese. Return the pizzas to the grill until the bread is warmed through and cheese is melted and gooey (if you’re using an oozy cheese, stop cooking when the bread is hot), about 2 minutes.
6. Sprinkle with fresh herbs, then slice and serve.

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