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.