Minimally Invasive

When I saw these babies at the farmers’ market yesterday, I scooped up a bunch for the clafoutis I’ve been craving since Spring first came to town. Clafoutis is just about the simplest dessert you can make, which is a real godsend for someone with my limited baking skills; it’s just a pancake-like batter poured over some type of fruit and baked until the top is brown and puffed and the inside is moist and firmly custardy. The traditional Limousin way of making a cherry clafoutis (it’s such a fun word to say, I’m going to repeat it over and over in this post for the sheer pleasure of saying it in my head — clafoutis, clafoutis) is to leave in the pits; now, I may not be the most traditional cook, but I am a pretty lazy one, so let’s just say my arm didn’t take too much twisting to leave them in. And honestly, spitting the pits is good summertime fun, like doing the same with watermelon seeds.

So I washed and stemmed the cherries and put them in a round baking dish roughly the size of a pie plate…

Do you know how difficult it was not to eat these straight? Gah.

And then I mostly followed Julia Child’s recipe for Clafoutis à la Bourdalone (cherry clafoutis with almonds) because hey, who doesn’t like almonds? Not me, that’s who. But if you don’t like them, I promise not to invite you over when I make this again, ok?

But I have a feeling you’d love this anyway.

See? CLAFOUTIS!

recipe after the jump

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OK, I give! Consider my arm twisted.

With all of the great blog posts on strawberry-rhubarb cobbler lately, there was no way I was going to be able to hold off making my own much longer; I gave in over the weekend and assembled one with some purchases from our very first local farmers’ market of the season. (For Gil’s pictures of Rufus’s day at the market, click here.)

Cobblers haven’t been featured here at all, due to a tragic tale of love and loss. When I was a teenager and thought in my teenagerly way that things last forever, I made a peach-strawberry cobbler of such great beauty that my grandmother raved about it. So what did I do? Continue to make cobblers with the rest of the summer’s bounty, thereby committing the recipe to memory? Share the recipe with someone who would’ve written it down for safe-keeping? No, I planned to make it again someday, but promptly lost the recipe (in my teenagerly way). While mourning that loss over the years, I fell hard for apple crisp and gave my heart to any number of bread puddings, which (mostly) pushed all thoughts of other fruit desserts out of my mind. Oh sure, the faint whiff of a peach could send me back, wishing I’d been more careful, pining ever so slightly for that magical soft-yet-crunchy biscuity topping. But mostly, I was happy to have the other options.

But as luck would have it, cobbler recipes are all pretty simple and similar, so I decided to take the plunge this weekend. The base is a mixture of fruit, sugar, and some kind of thickener, depending on the juiciness of the fruit.

Crispy, tart rhubarb

Juicy, sweet strawberries

Instead of using citrus zest in the fruit, I added balsamic vinegar to bring out the flavor of the strawberries and add a little complexity to the dessert.

Macerate, macerate, macerate

I made a couple of individual desserts, too. Cute, and the small portions kept us from devouring the whole dessert in one sitting.

The real difference between cobbler recipes seems to be in the topping. Both of the ones I referenced this weekend praised their cobbler toppings as crispy and just sweet enough, so I knew I was on the right path to finding my lost love.

At least this time, I’ve saved the recipe. And you’re welcome to it.

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And I aim to please. With gorgeous weather predicted for this Memorial Day weekend, I knew I’d have to break out the smoker, and what better way to kick off the summer than with a 7 1/2-pound pork butt?

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Because of my need to give homemade food gifts for the holidays, this is traditionally the weekend I atone for my lack of baking throughout the year — all at once. But instead of saying two dozen Hail Marys and 10 Our Fathers, my personal penance was making THREE batches of pralines, a few POUNDS of spiced nuts, and TWO types of cookies. Oh, my friends, I’m on a sugar high that would do Beavis proud. (What? You’ve never heard of quality assurance?)

For the pralines, I dug out my dad’s recipe which adulterates the traditional praline with marshmallows, but you’ve never tasted anything like them; they’re really creamy instead of gritty the way straight-sugar pralines can sometimes be. Gil would chime in to agree, only he’s shoving broken praline bits into his mouth and banging his head on the wall in the kitchen. Don’t worry — he’s wearing a bucket for protection. The sugar crash is going to be ugly.

But the real surprise of the weekend were the cookies, primarily surprising for the fact that I baked them and did not burn even one. I normally bring in savory treats for my co-workers (last year — bacon brittle and gougères), but I suspect people appreciate the sweet stuff a little bit more, so I was willing to go that extra mile for them. And we weren’t disappointed; I really hope they won’t be, either.

Here’s the really soft and sticky sugar cookie dough, cut and ready to be moved (CAREFULLY) to the parchment paper-lined baking sheet.

As it turns out, I didn’t really need to be SO careful because these cookies s-p-r-e-a-d in the oven.

But dressed up with chocolate and nut toupées, they turned very suave, indeed.

So I’m really looking forward to a well-deserved break from baking this week. Maybe I’ll be chained to my desk at work, but at least I won’t be in the kitchen, forced to bake and sample delicious sweets!

Are those tiny violins I hear in the distance?

Incidentally, how sad is it that this is the only brandy we have in the house? I had to break into our kitschy Eiffel Tower stash to flavor the cookies.

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Elegance
One perfect roasted pear. One perfect dessert.

For all Advent Calendar posts, click here.

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Christmas crackers!
My parents introduced me to crackers years ago, after picking up a box on a trip to England. I found these in a store near my office this week. They’ll make nice treats wrapped up with the gifts I’m giving this year, don’t you think?

For all Advent Calendar posts, click here.

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There was no bow
The best Christmas present I ever gave myself? That’s easy — Astrid, my Mini Cooper S, who came to live with us one year ago today. Happy birthday, girl!

For all Advent Calendar posts, click here.

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Stillness
The holiday season can be so busy for everyone, though Christmas Eve is really the craziest day for my family — a day of baking and preparing other food for the evening’s party, followed by a church service, then a huge get-together with my dad’s family. But as fun as it is, my very favorite part of the day is always getting back to a quiet house after the long evening — TV off — just the expectant stillness of the night and the sound of the wind in the trees.

For all Advent Calendar posts, click here.

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Let’s say you’re interested in making a certain dessert, a dessert that sounds so delicious there’s no way you could possibly wait until next weekend to prepare it. Let’s also say you don’t have the tart pan specified in the recipe, but are able to find mini tart pans at a local store. You’d try to make the recipe, anyway, wouldn’t you? Don’t leave me hanging, here. You would, right?

Well, I did, anyway. Perhaps I should’ve done the math to make sure I was using the proper number of tart pans. Or perhaps I should’ve eyeballed it better and realized the dough could stretch to five pans instead of the four I decided to use. Perhaps, schmerhaps. What’s done is done. This is the tale of my peach and thyme polenta tarts.

I started with the crust and things seemed to go well. The texture felt right and tasted like a good combination of savory and sweet, so I separated the dough into three sections before chilling them in the fridge. I realized a short time later that the dough would probably stretch into four tart pans, so I made adjustments on the fly when the time came to press the it into the pans. And still, everything looked ok to me.

So I baked them … and disaster ensued. The dough rose in the oven until it was nearly level across the pan, so I had to excavate the centers a bit for the filling. Once that was done, I noticed the peach slices would be far too big to arrange decoratively in the mini pans, so I trimmed them down and arranged and rearranged until I got a result almost pleasing to the eye.

That left filling the tarts with custard before baking, but with my track record on this dessert, I was worried. Would the custard leak through the tarts? Would they burn? Would they taste awful, making all of my work for naught? Oh, with the hand-wringing!

And then I pulled the tarts from the oven. Aaaahhh…

They weren’t the disaster I’d imagined and they smelled pretty good, too! But still, the test is in the tasting. After what seemed like a longer-than-average hour, we had the opportunity to take our first tentative bites of a tart andmadeshortworkofit.

I guess the moral of this story is to always follow directions, unless you really know what you’re doing. Of course, the corollary is if I can’t screw up this recipe, no one can (though I think I’ll look for the full-sized tart pan next time, just the same).

recipe after the jump

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