Just before Passo Corese, heading south on via Salaria from Rieti there’s an enlarged shoulder on the left hand side with 3 or 4 local fruit/vegetable vendors. On the way home we bought a 10 euro crate of some of the best white-flesh peaches I’ve ever tasted. Even after eating a handful of peaches every day, we still had a bowl full in the fridge that was starting to get too soft. So Paloma and I set out to make something sweet with them.

First we cut all the peaches and Paloma tossed them in a pie dish. I splashed some white wine and lemon juice on it to bring out the flavor and then we mixed a crumble topping made of flour, raw sugar, brown sugar, some mashed almonds, cinnamon and butter. We smushed the topping on and tossed it in the oven and then went to play with a new “Crime Scene Inspector Kit” that she received as a belated birthday present. As the crumble baked we put fingerprints on glasses and then dusted and removed them, placing the new fingerprints in special baggies marked “evidence” that could be compared with a magnifying glass. We taped off the dining room table as a crime scene while Paloma continued to play Inspector and gather enough evidence to prove that her sister Giulia had drank her juice even though she claimed not to.

I could smell the pie. It looked particularly good and so I asked Paloma to help me remember what we’d put in and write it out as a recipe so we could reproduce it. The following is the recipe in Inspector P’s secret code: