Smelling a ripe peach immediately brings to mind several food memories: summers on my parents' deck, eating the fruit as quickly as I could as it leaked all over my arm. Family beach trips to South Carolina and finishing dinner with a peach. And most recently, our trip to Fishfill Farms, on an especially hot August day, to go peach-picking.

The trees were laden down with peaches that day; we could have easily filled our buckets in under 5 minutes, returned to our car, and driven away. But we wanted to linger a bit and savor being on the farm (despite the bees!) so we wandered from tree-to-tree, picking only the most perfectly shaped and ripe fruit, trying to slow things down.

When we got home that late summer day, after parking our Zipcar two miles away and walking slowly back to our apartment, cradling the buckets of peaches, I quickly separated the most ripe and slightly bruised peaches into a pile for immediate consumption. I then blanched the remaining peaches long enough to remove their skins, before cutting and freezing the slices into gallon-sized freezer bags.

As we rapidly approach our move date, my meal planning is now structured around items in our freezer and pantry that we can't take with us (such as flour, quinoa, and way too many red lentils). I hadn't forgotten about these frozen peaches; I was waiting to find a recipe that would easily incorporate the slices without feeling too forced.

If you're interested in baking with different kinds of grains and flours and really understanding the differences between these grains, you'll find no better resource than Kim Boyce's Good to the Grain. Boyce is the former pastry chef at Spago and Campanile. As an exciting sidenote, she and her family recently moved to Portland where she opened up a bakery called Bakeshop.

I've now baked four recipes from this cookbook, including some stellar carrot muffins, and while it's an ongoing process and one I hope to concentrate on more fully once we move, I am slowly gaining a better understanding of different grains' textures and consistencies.

I've made Boyce's recipe for Ginger Peach Muffins twice. The muffins contain all-purpose flour, whole grain flour, and oat flour. She describes oat flour as having a mild, milky taste that pairs well with fruits and chocolate. Oat flour is ground from the kernels of oats and doesn't contain gluten. Because of this, her recipe mixes in all-purpose and whole wheat, to add structure to the muffins and avoid gumminess. If you don't have access to oat flour, you can make your own by processing rolled oats in a food processor.

These muffins combine two of my favorite flavors, ginger and peaches. The process is straightforward and contained. You'll need a bowl for wet ingredients, a bowl for dry, and a sautee pan for the peaches. As for the peaches, if you didn't freeze any this past summer, you can certainly bake these muffins with frozen peaches from the grocrey store. Or, wait until peach season, and bake these with a perfectly ripe peach!