Flaugnarde

This weekend was bonkers in the best possible way. Family, food, fog, a baby both cutting his first tooth and learning to crawl (and trying finger food - it was a breakthrough day indeed).

At the eleventh hour, I learned I was to bring dessert to a dinner party. Having just made an eggy dish for brunch, I knew I had eggs but little else.

Cue a mad dash to the old stalwarts - a quick look in the Moosewood, a glance in Feast, and then hitting pay dirt when I found a tremendously easy and beautiful-looking dessert from Real Simple - Martha's people called it a pear custard, but I decided to call it a clafoutis, something I had come across while reading this blog. It called for nothing more than three eggs, 2 teaspoons of vanilla, 1/3 cup each of flour and sugar, 3/4 cup of milk and three pears.

Well, I had one pear. And a couple of apples, which seemed like a good start.

Upon further research, it turns out a clafoutis is specific to the fruit, is, in fact, a baked cherry custard dessert, and what I had made, was a pear and apple baked custard. I discovered that if I was going to go the provincial French route, then what I had truly made was more along the lines of a flaugnarde.

I know. It's so obvious, isn't it?

The true joy in discovering this dessert lay in three things:

1. It's stunningly beautiful. Well, at least you have to admit the above looks like it took some sort of effort, right?

2. I have never made anything easier in my life. If you can chop fruit and run a blender and turn on an oven, you've got it made.

3. This may be one of my favorite kinds of recipes - the kind you can throw together at the last minute using whatever you have to hand. I foresee making this with raspberries, bananas, strawberries, figs, plums, peaches, apricots.

Don't forget to sprinkle confectioner's sugar on. It gives it that little extra something.

Grain Cooker

Making dinner in a hurry means a few things have been dropped from our repertoire (soup with eleventy components added at all different times / taboule / things where you have to hover over the stove top for an hour) and certain appliances have taken on new-found meaning and worth, including an electric pressure cooker I thought I would never learn how to use (more on that in a later (maybe much later, I know) post) and our rice cooker, which has now become our all-purpose grain cooker as farro, pearl barley, and quinoa all come out of it like a dream.

Cue the featured meal - pesto quinoa with grilled zucchini, arugula, cannelini beans, and tomatoes.

It turns out quinoa is perfect in the rice cooker. Now, before having a baby I would have asked what is so difficult about putting quinoa on the stove, letting it come to a boil, then reducing it to a simmer for another ten minutes. I'll tell you what's a huge pain about that. The number of times I have to come back to the stove while tending to a small, soon-to-be-mobile infant, that's what. With the rice machine, we chuck it in and it clicks when it's done, and those little tongues or whatever they are in quinoa have all become unfurled so that it's crunchy and chewy and good.

Mr. ToujoursDelish makes huge batches of pesto at a time so that we always have some in the freezer. It used to languish away while we cooked fresh meals every day, but now it's a delicious lifesaver, coming out to play just when we think we've run out of tasty, fresh food for the week.

So, firing up the oven for the zucs, washing some arugula, putting quinoa in the rice cooker, and tossing some beans in lemon and olive oil brings us this fresh, easy dish. It couldn't be simpler.*

*although to be frank, writing up this list of several things to do makes it sound fussy. It's not. I promise.

L-O-V-E Eggplant

L is for the luscious purple hue...

O is for the oven temperature (450 or higher)

V is very, very extraordinary

E is enjoying roasted eggplant over coconut barley

Hello! I cook, I promise. In fact, I'm still cooking all the time. I find that if I eat out too much, the food, no matter whether it be Chinese, Indian, Thai, burgers, even salads, etc., all ends up tasting the same - rich, salty, and fatty. Which are all wonderful things, but become less enjoyable as the number of times we eat out or order in edges up over the course of a week.

Which brings me to the things I'm cooking. After four months of maternity leave and making all of my old standards again and again - cassoulet, eggplant-mozarella-sausage pasta, pasta alla vodka, and even some Chicken Kiev - I found myself sick of my own cooking. Sad. Really sad. Because I like my food better than almost all other food in the world. I can say that, right? I mean, I know what I like, and I have a supremely unfussy eater in Mr. TD, so I almost always make things that are precisely to my (our?) tastes.

But sometimes those tastes can become saturated, and all of the hearty heaviness of the above meals, in triplicate so that we had leftovers to smooth the way through the land of sleep deprivation, became too much. I can't eat something I don't feel like, end of story, and so we've branched out. Just in time for our San Francisco summer.

San Francisco summer is a contradiction, for it is frequently a cold and foggy place, but our local grocers have tables groaning with the fruits of a California summer. Our meals can bear to be slightly heavier than the average summer cook's, all the while with the mission of eating as many fresh veggies as possible.

That said, here is the first of our meals that has now been on repeat these last few weeks for its ease and comparative lightness.

Roasted Eggplant and Zucchini with Coconut Barley

Set the oven to 450.

Slice the eggplant into 1/4 inch rounds. Slice zucchini very thinly - I like it lengthwise for this, but it makes no difference. Toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast on a rimmed baking sheet for 25 minutes, checking every so often to shift things around.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Load up the rice cooker with 1 1/2 cups of barley, a can of coconut milk, a handful of almonds, and raisins. Add enough water or stock to have enough liquid (probably 2 1/2 cups or so?), and set the machine.

Go and have a glass of wine while it all takes care of itself.

Serve with cold Greek yoghurt drizzled with olive oil (and if you had some tomatoes, a roast tomato wouldn't go amiss here either).

Poached Eggs and Salmon

Let's say you go through a period of time where certain food are off-limits. What would you crave?

I missed runny egg yolks and smoked salmon like you wouldn't believe and spent the second half of my gestation imagining the day when I would learn how to poach on egg so that I could combine two of my favorite foods in a delectable, rich salad, with the orange yolk breaking just so over the pile of lettuce leaves and salmon.

Mission accomplished. One of the most delicious salads ever. Poaching an egg ain't the easiest way to cook an egg, but it sure is fun and can have amazing results.

Next up...baked eggs. Another way to enjoy scrumptious runny-yolked goodness.

Pretty Side Veggies

It would seem from my near-radio silence on this blog that I may not have been cooking much recently, and many of you would be sympathetic, imagining that in my current state I am spending much more time with my feet up than planted firmly on the kitchen floor.

And yet...cooking is happening. It's happening with frequency, and in some cases, with results I continue to be really happy with. What isn't happening is the coordination of photos, recipes, and sitting down to write at the computer to transmit the message.

But here is an opportunity too good to pass up. An image already uploaded by Mr. Toujours-Delish. A recipe so easy, I don't need to be near my cookbooks to tell you about it. And pretty enough to bring to a holiday function, in our case, a lovely family dinner hosted by Mr. TD's sis in Berkeley!


This is, according to the Barefoot Contessa, a tian. Tian is a word that means cosmos, sky, heavens in Chinese, and apparently also refers to this type of French veggie dish. She shares the recipe here.

Here's how we made it:

Fry up an onion and some garlic until translucent. Line the bottom of the roasting dish with it.

Chop up a variety of round vegetables to roughly the same thickness. We used potatoes of a wide variety of colors - pink, yellow, purple, and white - as well as Chinese eggplant, which are smaller versions of the big purple kind, tomatoes, and zucchini.

Drizzle with olive oil. Season. Add a fresh herb or two (we used rosemary instead of thyme).

Bake for half an hour to forty minutes to cook the veggies somewhat.

Grate cheese ALL over it (2 oz. of cheese is NOTHING - grate the whole slab onto it if you want). Add a bit more salt and pepper.

Bake until gloriously browned and cheesy.

Word to the wise - these vegetables all let off a lot of water when they roast. As such, this dish didn't travel as well as we had hoped. The back seat of the car ended up with a rosemary-infused oil slick. But the veggies were still tasty.

Meat Pie - Hearty food for when you run out of turkey

Mr. ToujoursDelish and I have now been to England to visit my family together several times. Besides coming back with a whole host of beautiful pictures of English flora and fauna (sheep and moss come to mind), Mr. TD has also developed a taste for Steak and Ale pie. I bring you, in a manner of speaking, a guest post as this meal was prepared by my hubs based on the recipe from the cafeteria at Croome Court*:

Hand-raised Steak and Ale Pie

Makes 6 individual pies (or one big one, in our case)

Pastry Crust

For the filling:

700 g stewing steak (8-ish oz of meat!)

450 ml traditional ale (not lager or stout...Jenny's note - unless that's all you have!)

120 g carrots - peeled and diced

2 tbs plain flour

1 medium onion, diced

sea salt and black pepper

As with most recipes, we did whatever the heck we wanted, so here it is in pictures:


Fry up the steak with a filling of your choice. In this case, it's parsnips and onions.


Add the ale (beer is a terrific meat-tenderizer, as is vodka, according to the Russian lady at our local booze shop).


Add flour.


Simmer it all until it's gravy-like..


Yum. I am sure some salting and peppering took place at some point.


If the pie crust looks as if it was home-made, it's because it was. I'm practically at my wit's end with pie crust, though. I think store-bought may wend its way back into my heart.

Poke a hole in the top for steam to evaporate. Or use a pie bird.

Et voila! Hearty, meaty, mid-winter, English fayre.


*Croom Court is a strange place. It has been owned by the National Trust, a terrific organization that swoops in and rescues historic buildings and places. This place, though, is basically a big empty stately house that the Hare Krishnas took over two or three decades ago and painted all the trim in wacky colors. The Trust is still trying to figure out what to do with it. In the meantime, you can tour an almost empty house filled with eager and kind docents who then very sincerely ask you to fill out a survey on what best should be done with the house. More pictures here.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks.

And Now - A Mound of Carrots

Let's say just the day before, you've worked your way through three pounds of zucchini by pureeing them into a soup. And now imagine you have an equivalent amount of carrots. The last thing in the world you want is another baby food-style mushy soup (even if it will be delicious - it's a lot of pureed vegetables for a grownup to handle).

So you turn to the second, and arguably more fun, thing to do with your excess of vegetables.

Cake!

A friend of mine told me to buy Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook because I had a food processor and I still didn't know what to do with it. She assured me that the vegetarian cookbook full of delicious recipes was a great way to put that processor to good use - there's always some vegetable to shred in the recipes. I shredded the pounds of carrots in preparation for sinning them up with sugar, butter, flour:

Mollie Katzen's Carrot Cake

1 1/2 cups butter

1 3/4 cups packed brown sugar

4 eggs

3 tsp vanilla extract

1tsp grated lemon zest

4 cups flour

1tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 Tbsp baking powder

1 tsp allspice (I didn't have this and didn't miss it)

2 tsp cinnamon

2 1/2 cups packed finely shredded carrot combined with 1/4 cup lemon juice

You can add 3/4 cup of raisins and / or nuts or 1/2 cup unsweetened coconut (if only I'd had some to hand!)

Preheat over to 350. I made half of the above quantity which goes into one standard loaf pan. If you make all of the above, it comes out to two loaves or one big oblong pan (e.g. your brownie pan).

Beat together butter and sugar until fluffy, then add vanilla and lemon rind.

Combine dry ingredient, then add to butter mixture, alternating with the carrot, beginning and ending with the dry goods. Don't overmix! (Does anyone know why? I think it's because it kills the butter bubbles you've so carefully made when beating butter and sugar together, and they go on to form the pleasing crumbly cake crumb. Any other reasons you know of?)

Bake for 40 or 50 minutes in the loaf pan, or 35 minutes in the oblong pan.

Although I made this cake in the summer due to the surfeit of vegetables in the house, the cinnamon, raisins, and nuts made this a gorgeously fall-flavored cake, perfect with a cup of tea and some cold weather swirling outside.