Fig Clafoutis

Fig Clafoutis

Another favorite book that I haven't used enough is Simple Soirees, by Peggy Knickerbocker. I love how it lays out various entertaining menus, though I'm nowhere near well set up to actually follow them. Still, there are plenty of individual recipes to pick out. I'd been meaning to make this one for a while, then forgot about it.

Until one day I had a hankering for a fig, but could only buy them in pints. I love figs, but can only eat so many. Your tongue stings after a few, what's that about? For an unrelated reason, I thumbed through Simple Soirees again, and stumbled across the fig clafoutis recipe I'd backburnered. So for no other reason than the coincidence that I happened to have a near-pint of figs not to waste, I made the clafouti recipe.

I've made a Pear Clafouti before, and loved it. So much so that I searched high and low to find a white 10" round baking dish just for clafoutis, which I found in an unlikely place: a $10 quiche dish at Macy's. So I'm set.

Clafouti (not sure if the 's' in this recipe is part of the name or a plural) is so easy to make there's little to say about it, though clafouti itself is very fun to say. Eggs, cream, sugar, and voila: custard.

The only thing I found about setting fresh figs cut into disks atop the batter is that they sort of floated on the batter, and made for an odd appearance. The recipe says not to worry if they sink, but I wish they had sunk, so they looked less like a pizza topping.

The recipe offers an alternative to fresh figs, which is to reconstitute dried figs in port. Mm! Now we're talking! I think that right there trumps the fresh-fig route. Not to mention, you can make this any time of the year, outside that short weeks-long window when you can buy fresh figs.

Alas, but these are all nits. I love clafoutis, with their mild flavor and ambiguous use (dessert, breakfast, afternoon tea snack). Figs raise them to a new class level. Naturally, I'm the only one in my family who would dream of touching this, so it'll have to wait for a fig-appreciative audience.

Cinnamon-Apple Walnut Torte

Cinnamon-Apple Walnut Torte

(Is it possible it's been two months since I've posted? It's ironic that overseeing a grand new kitchen remodel, baking once a week for the construction crew, and somehow hosting and cooking for parties at our temporary digs has kept me from blogging! Too much cooking, not enough writing.)

I love this book: Coffee Cakes, by Lou Seibert Pappas. I think I picked it up at Borders one day, in one of those browsy moods when you just feel like buying something. Rarely do those purchases work out, but this book has become one of my favorites.

So it's odd that I pick this recipe of all to post about, since it really didn't work out all that well. It's described as a "torte," and uses very little flour, only 1/4 cup. Perhaps I don't know what a "torte" is (OK, I don't), and perhaps I was fooled by the comment that says to bake until the "cake" is set. There was nothing cakey about it. In fact, it was much more like a gooey crisp than a cake, and needed a spoon to be scooped out.

But the bones were unbeatable: how can you go wrong with cinnamon, apples, cranberries and walnuts? As with all the recipes in this book, the taste was unbeatable, and the instructions were clear.

This photo makes it look like it held its shape, but that is the result of careful staging. The texture was more like that of a chunky pudding.

Not that anyone complained -- it's hard to go wrong with cinnamon and apples in the winter -- but when I'm bringing something to a gathering at which most people are sitting on couches with plastic plates teetering on their laps, I like to bring treats that can easily be handled with fingers.

I'll most certainly make this again, since I suspect user error above all else. Meantime, perhaps I'll catch a clue about what a torte is.

And now, I have some more catching up to do!

Turkey Osso Buco

Turkey Osso Buco with Parsley and Rosemary Gremolata

It's not often I can be inspired for a recipe from the truly right place: my nose. But this one came straight from there, via our family daycare lady's new husband, who likes to cook Italian. I picked up my daughter one day and olfactory senses were sent straight to heaven. Conveniently, this recipe was online, courtesy Giada di Laurentiis.

My Italian is limited to "grazie," but I'm fairly certain "osso" means "bone." So I went against this recipe first thing, with the title ingredient no less, and used boneless turkey breasts. I know my family better than that, and anything with bones in it doubles the work for me cutting everything up.

Still, the rest of the ingredients are no-brainers: onions, carrots, wine, tomato paste...how can you go wrong? Naturally I omitted the celery, as I was born with the rare CTA (Celery Tastes Awful) gene.

This was overall easy to make, the most labor-intensive thing being chopping herbs for the gremolata (??whazzat??) and that wasn't bad at all. I sure could use a good roasting pan that can easily transfer from the stovetop to the oven though -- the cheap dented one I have kept spinning on the cooktop.

The cooking smells filled the house as promised, and the final result also looked beautiful.

My first attempt at accompanying risotto failed completely, but I just called it "fat dry rice" and no one knew the difference.

My picky husband really liked it, my somewhat-picky son liked it, and my eats-everything son loved it. My daughter, who indirectly started it all, detected the faintest speck of green and instantly rejected it, but with enough exposure to those fabulous smells at her daycare, she'll come around.

Pear Mince Streusel Bars

Pear Mince Streusel Bars

This is ridiculous -- over two months since I've posted?! But I've been baking like crazy. At least once a week, I bake something to bring to the construction crew at our house-under-construction for our weekly Friday jobsite meetings.

I tried this recipe in my quest to solve The Peach Challenge: how to bake with peaches in such a way that can be easily cut up, given away, and consumed with just hands? Most peach-baking is pies and cobblers, strictly plate-and fork affairs.

From my now all-time favorite baking book, "Cookies for Christmas" by Jennifer Darling, this Pear Mince Streusel bar recipe looked like it could be adapted for fruit other than pears. Thanks to my CSA fruit subscription, I had an excess of peaches, plums and pluots, and couldn't bear to throw them away when they got too ripe to eat in hand. So I thought I'd substitute them for pears.

It took me a few tries to get the "bar" concept. You bake a crust first, to give structure to what's really more like a cookie than a cake, and then add filling and topping and bake it again. The filling for this recipe is terrific, and flexible also, using orange juice or brandy, and raisins or currants. I've tossed cranberries in there as well, though anything larger than a currant is supposed to be snipped. As it's cooking, the fruit, brown sugar and brandy fills the house with Christmas-y sorts of scents, it's great.

I had a willing helper who thought snipping raisins was a fine idea.


It took me a try or two to get my oven temperature to cooperate, but I did succeed in making cuttable, holdable, distinct bars. The result has been universally popular, and is an attractive and fun thing to bring to a gathering.

I'm looking forward to trying this with pears!

Grilled Portobello Mushrooms

Grilled Portobello Mushrooms

Among the various offerings inside a grilled veggie sandwich at a reasonable Italian restaurant I had one day, my favorite was the portobello mushroom. Mild flavor, consistent smooth texture...mm! So when I saw a package of portobello mushrooms at Trader Joe's that afternoon, they were instantly mine. With access to an outdoor gas grill in our rental house, I look for any excuse to grill.

But what recipe? I quickly searched allrecipes.com and found one that called for marinating in a balsamic vinegar mixture. Perfect! I'm into balsamic these days. The recipe called for onion, but I did it with some red onion I had handy anyway. Mix it up, pop it on the grill...sounds easy!

Sure, if you know what you're doing. The recipe called for gill-side-up for grilling the portobellos, making for a little reservoir for the marinade. Leave it on or off? I decided to leave it on and not flip the mushroom.

There's a lot of margin for error in grilling portobellos, I think, because they're perfectly edible uncooked. As much as I love balsamic flavor, the balsamic overwhelmed the mild mushroom flavor, rendering the portobello a mere vehicle for the strong vinegar. But that wasn't so bad.

I really liked this, but it's hard to go wrong with portobellos anyway. As is so often the case, I was the only one in my family who'd even try it. Fine, because I only had two caps anyway.

I need a lot more practice before I dare present this to mushroom aficianados, but I'm looking forward to that.

Pan-Seared Ahi with Blood Orange Sauce

Pan-Seared Ahi with Blood Orange Sauce
Ah, TJ's...a never-ending source of inspiration. I try not to buy ingredients without having a basic plan for it, but this Wild Ahi looked too good to pass up. Even if a small package was ten bucks.

This new thing about actually having heat in my temporary kitchen opens all sorts of doors. I've seared fish before, with rubbery results, but with some serious firepower under the pan now, it was worth trying again.

I found this recipe for Pan-Seared Ahi with Blood Orange Sauce on allrecipes.com. Like most reviewers, I didn't happen to have blood oranges, let alone enough to squeeze out a cup, so plain-old store-bought OJ would have to do. I heeded the advice that the recipe calls for far too much cook time, with one reviewer accurately quipping "more than a few minutes, then you might as well open a can of tuna and call it a day."

The sauce was easy to make, and the fish easy enough to cook. The tricky part was: how long? It became immediately clear that the quality of the ingredients, and skill or luck of the cook would make or break it. Well, I managed to cook it in range, despite my lack of familiarity with my hot new cooktop, but another 20 seconds and I'd have gone over. The fish itself was really outstanding to begin with, so it was really mine to mess up.

I loved this. The sauce was light and a little sweet, not overpowering, and a perfect complement to perfectly (well, almost) lightly cooked fish. I will certainly make this again, but only if I find the right fish to begin with.

Bonus: my husband liked it and my sons wouldn't try it! All the more for me!

Endive, Pear, and Roquefort Salad

Endive, Pear, and Roquefort Salad

Yet another little gem from my all-time favorite Barefoot Contessa episode, "French Made Easy." I'm not sure how French this recipe really is, but it sure sounds French when you say "on-DEEV" instead of "en-dIve."

I made this salad in the most intimidating of circumstances: not in my own kitchen, in a rural area in Pennsylvania without access to a Whole Foods, and for a large group of people that included a genuine professional chef -- and my mother. I didn't have Roquefort cheese or champagne vinegar, so ordinary bleu cheese (see, it's French if you write "bleu" instead of "blue"), and very ordinary white wine vinegar would have to do.

I'd never made an emulsified dressing before, but as soon as you put fresh fruit in a salad, I'm willing to try anything. The dressing was actually simple to make, despite needing some actual technique of whisking up the olive oil at the end. Fortunately I was able to find some appropriate pears, Bartletts, and at the right ripeness.

As always, I over-toasted the walnuts and ended up liking them better that way. I don't know if that's a shared sentiment though.

I've had endives in salads before and liked them, so I was surprised when my sister said she found them bitter. And now that I made a whole salad based on endives, I had to agree. In fact, the only thing I didn't like much about this salad, other than the dull cheese, was the endive base itself. They make for a nice presentation, but I think a different "green" would taste better. Maybe radicchio?


Fortunately for me, I'm still in the stage of cooking that everyone wants to encourage me instead of offering genuine criticism (sort of like you always tell your 4-year-old that the picture he drew was great), so reviews all around were good. Still, I think there's much room for improvement the next time -- and there will be a next time, as this simple combination is exactly the sort of twist on basic ingredients that I love.