Peach Pancakes + Peach Maple Syrup

It’s peach season! Is there anything better than a fresh, ripe peach straight off the tree? I think not.

Before we dive too deep into the recipe I wanted to share a few thoughts that these peaches have brought up for me.

We get a lot of messages about how fortunate we are to have these amazing stories from our Italian family and all of their recipes that connect us to them. We have heard time and time again from others wishing they had this same connection and cultural experience with their family.

I want to yell from the rooftops YOU DO!!! You may not be Italian. Your family may not be cooks. You may not even know what your heritage is. But you have everything you need….you just need to make the connection.

We focus on our Italian heritage here but did you know my dad is not Italian? He doesn’t have some amazing immigration story. He was born and raised in a small town in Utah. His family wasn’t known for their cooking or baking or anything of the sort. They didn’t dance around the kitchen cooking and eating and singing together. BUT- that doesn’t mean their recipes, their food, their traditions can’t have meaning for my little family now.

So what does this have to do with peaches? Let me tell you.

My dad’s grandparents owned a little family farm in Farmington, Utah. They had a peach orchard which, according to my dad, had the best peaches he had ever tasted. Gleason Alberta was the variety. Since I was young I can remember my dad talking about these “amazing peaches” from grandpa’s farm. Just about every time he would eat a peach whether from the store or a friend/neighbor/family member’s tree he would say “just not as good as the ones from the farm”.

4 years ago, when my husband and I bought our house I knew I wanted to plant this oh so special peach tree. I called up my dad to make sure I got the right variety and started calling all the nursery’s until I found someone who carried the Gleason Alberta peach tree.

Finally, after years of babying our peach tree, we had our first crop of peaches!! I was so excited to finally taste these “famous” peaches. Once they were ripe the girls and I picked them and I sent some out to my dad to see if they would get his stamp of approval. His exact words were “that’s the first peach I remember tasting like the peaches off the farm, that’s a good peach!”

With our basket of prized peaches quickly ripening my 7 year old daughter and I made 3 batches of peach jam. I told her the stories of papa and his peach prejudices and the family peach orchard with “the best peaches”. She was so proud of our peaches and everything we were making with them!

We had a handful of peaches left we didn’t know what to do with. My daughter was worried “papa’s special peaches” were going to go bad before we could eat them so she came up with an idea to make peach pancakes and peach syrup. We set to it, using my mom’s pancake recipe (with a few tweaks) and made a peach puree syrup with all the delicious syrup necessities (like maple and butter). My daughter wrote down the ingredients and the instructions and was so proud to be developing her first recipe.

We topped the pancakes off with our newly developed (and way too delicious) syrup, whipped cream, and some fresh peaches.

We have been eating these for 3 days now…we keep thinking that we will get sick of them but every time we eat them we are just amazed at how good they are. It’s like dessert for breakfast and we are here for it!

The connection between food and family may date back generations, maybe not. Maybe you are forging the way for your family now but I promise you, if you look, the pieces are there just waiting to be connected. Food is a powerful source that brings people together. It is connection to memories. It is a source of love and happiness that goes much deeper than a full belly.