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.

recipe after the jump

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Apples and oranges
Every Christmas Eve as we exit the church, everyone is given an apple and an orange to celebrate the holiday. So you can pretty much count on a fruit salad at our house on Christmas day, is what I’m saying.

For all Advent Calendar posts, click here.

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recipe after the jump

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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).

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The idea of throwing out food is anathema to those of us who grew up in families that maybe didn’t have so much money. My aunts can squeeze a nickel till it bleeds, my dad would rather cut off his left hand than let anything wither in his garden, and my grandma always saved her cooking oil (and bacon grease, natch) because of the starving kids in China. The plight of malnourished Indian children weighed more heavily on my other grandma’s conscience, so she recycled the bread crusts I demanded cut from my sandwiches into her bread pudding. My family was green before green was cool, or something.

So when I noticed a bunch of arugula wilting in the crisper drawer, a container of ricotta’s expiration date fast approaching, and a big hunk of pancetta taunting me from it’s perch, I knew something had to be done. After eating tomatoes every single day for almost a week, a sauce wasn’t at the top of my list, so I threw together an arugula and nectarine salad topped with spicy caramelized pancetta. And yes, in case you were wondering, caramelized pancetta is just as good as you imagined.

The ricotta I felt was best saved for dessert, specifically for a scrumptious-sounding recipe for chocolate and ricotta cupcakes I found while perusing Orangette last week. Since we had all of the ingredients on hand, Gil got to work sifting and mixing. (He’s adding to his repertoire, which is scrambled eggs, chocolate chip cookies, and now these cupcakes.) Though there was a distinct lack of swirl in the cupcakes (for which I take full responsibility, as I was the designated swirler), they were delicious enough to tempt the cupcake gnome from his hiding place. I caught a glimpse of him running away and shaking his fist, a flurry of crumbs wafting to the ground. He seemed to approve of my thrifty ways, if the liner was any indication:

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Those little beauties, my friends, are heirloom black cherry tomatoes from one of the many heirloom purveyors at the Union Square Greenmarket. They were too delicious eaten straight from the bowl to even consider doing anything to them. (They were also responsible for converting one of my friends to the wonders of the greenmarket. She ate the few I shared with her and ran straight to Union Square at lunch for more. Once she discovered the fresh peaches and everydarnedthing else they sell, she pledged her allegiance right then and there.)

But because I never met an heirloom I didn’t like, I had tons of others in assorted shapes and sizes, so I made a grilled peach salsa with some of them. The sweetness of the peaches was tempered by the meaty, grilled flavor of the other ingredients — tomatoes, red onion, garlic — and brightened by a splash of cider vinegar and chopped cilantro. I seasoned it only with salt and a healthy dose of red pepper powder. So simple, but such a great way to use the fresh produce this time of year.

I’ve been craving gal bee and the assorted sides all week, so I took another stab at my old favorite this afternoon. Despite the lack of flanken-style ribs or even skirt steak at my local supermarket, the marinade was plenty good on the strip steaks I was able to find.

Oh, and the greenmarket peppers were just wonderful, too:

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We got to the farmers’ market a little late yesterday, so there was no grass-fed beef of any kind left for us, but plenty of fruit and vegetables looking for a good home. My singular mission was to get enough tomatoes for the pappa al pomodoro I’ve been craving all week, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Out of necessity, I changed the Food & Wine recipe a bit to accomodate the ingredients we had on-hand (shallots instead of onions) and my inherent laziness (I used a food mill instead of juicing and seeding the tomatoes by hand). Last week’s heat somehow didn’t kill off my basil — though my spearmint has given up the ghost — so we had plenty to stir in at the end along with a large dollop of ricotta. To say that this was a delicious recipe would be a huge understatement.

I can’t imagine why I’m not part Italian.

And then there was the stone fruit stand. With so many varieties on display, it was tough to choose just one, but I went with the sugar plums after much consideration. And I knew just what to do with them — a sugar plum torte! (Not pepperoni pizza, no matter what your eyes tell you!) I found a simple, basic recipe linked at Orangette’s site and modified it ever so slightly to suit my purposes.

Pitting the plums took some time and patience, but I was rewarded with gorgeous jewel-toned fruit (which the pictures don’t do justice) that already tasted like dessert before they were even baked.

recipes after the jump

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