Very Berry Clafoutis

July 24, 2015June 29, 2018 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 17 Comments

Clafoutis: noun [klah-foo-tee] a tart made of fruit, especially cherries, baked in a thick, sweet batter.

My mother gave me this berry clafoutis recipe about twenty-five years ago after I had picked blueberries with my boys while visiting her in Rhode Island. She had written the recipe on a piece of scrap paper. There are scraps of paper like this all over her kitchen. Mom suggested I make a clafoutis with the blueberries. I had no idea what a clafoutis was, but I made it. It was delicious … and easy. Over the course of that summer, I baked clafoutis of every variety: strawberry, blackberry, pear, apple and plum. They all worked. Little did I know I would be making this recipe for the rest of my life.

Recipes like this, that really work and are beloved, go into a spiral-bound recipe book I was given as a wedding gift over 30 years ago. I travel with this notebook. If there was a fire in the house, after getting the people out, I’d grab this notebook next. Before holidays, I often get emails from relatives asking for specific recipes from this book, like my Grandmother’s cranberry chutney recipe and my mother’s pumpkin pie recipe. My Auntie Terry once emailed me, while she was traveling, to ask if I could send her her fried cauliflower batter recipe. I love how my role as keeper-of-the-recipes keeps me connected to my family.

This recipe is probably the simplest and quickest one @judyschickens. It tastes good hot out of the oven for dessert, or cold the next morning for breakfast. If you want to serve it at a dinner party, you can make it taste a little richer by substituting cream for some of the milk and by sifting confectioner’s sugar over the top after you have baked it. The best part is you can make it with ingredients you already have in the house: eggs, milk, flour, sugar, vanilla and fruit, which makes it perfect for a last-minute dessert on a summer evening.

Ingredients:

3 large eggs. *I had a very small egg from my chickens that I threw in!
2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon salt
1¼ cups milk, or a combination of milk and cream
2 cups fruit. If you use apples or pears, peel, core, and slice thinly.

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350º
Generously butter a 9-inch pie plate

You can make this batter in a food processor, with a mixer, or in a bowl with a whisk or fork. Just be sure to add the milk after you have mixed the other ingredients or the flour will form clumps.

Beat eggs for about 30 seconds. Add flour, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg and salt.

Mix until smooth, about 30 seconds.

Add milk and mix on slow speed until batter is well blended, about 30 seconds.

Pour batter into a buttered pie pan.

Add fruit. Be sure to dry the fruit after washing it. Adding wet fruit to the batter sometimes causes water to pool on the surface as the clafoutis cooks. If that happens, I open the oven door, lay a paper towel over the top, just for a second, and mop up the excess moisture, and then continue baking.

Bake in a preheated oven for 45-55 minutes. The clafoutis should be lightly browned and puffed on top. Test for doneness by inserting a knife into the center. It will come out clean if the interior is cooked. If it doesn’t come out clean, cook for 5 more minutes. Let cool 10 minutes before serving. The pouf will settle down.

Clafoutis-Making, Part 2

My Aunt Rachelle and I were cooking dinner together last week and decided to make clafoutis using cherries that were already in the refrigerator. We made a mess cutting the pits out of the cherries. While it didn’t impact the taste of the clafoutis one iota — it was still gone in sixty seconds — it wasn’t very pretty.

Last night, I was determined to try a cherry clafoutis again and this time make it pretty. That called for a quick stop at Williams and Sonoma to pick up a cherry (and olive) pitter. This time, I was making the clafoutis with Rachelle’s daughter, Elizabeth. We couldn’t wait to get home and try the cherry pitter. What a great tool! Knowing my husband likes to study how mechanical devices work, I tried to Tom Sawyer him into pitting the cherries, but he didn’t take the bait. No worries, the pitter makes quick work of removing cherry pits.

In this clafoutis version, I substituted one 8-ounce carton of heavy cream for 1 cup of the milk and used ¼ cup of 2% milk for the remainder.

The results were spectacular, albeit more calories! The fat in the batter made the clafoutis rise sky-high before it settled back down as it cooled. It looks very different from the photos of the strawberry and cherry clafoutis shown above. Here it is sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. This version makes for a lovely dessert.

So, clafoutis are a crustless “tart made of fruit, especially cherries, baked in a thick, sweet batter.”

Hope you enjoy!

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Quiche Lorraine with Bacon and Kale

April 2, 2015January 7, 2019 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 12 Comments

Last year, our friends, Maribeth and Michael, hosted an impromptu and festive Easter Brunch. I volunteered to bring something eggy. The morning of the brunch, I looked at what I had in the fridge: eggs, cheese, and bacon, with green onions and kale growing in the backyard. I decided on quiches.

I had a Trader Joe’s pie crust in the freezer. All I needed from the grocery store was heavy cream. Easy-peasy. It doesn’t take much to make a quiche which is just a mixture of custard (eggs and cream), cheese, vegetables, bacon if desired, and pie crust. You can easily make do with what you have on hand: mushroom and onion, spinach and goat cheese, tomato and corn, whatever you have in the fridge. This week, I went for the kale and green onion version because once again, I had both growing in my winter garden.

The kale and green onions wintered-over under hoops covered with agricultural fabric as I described here.

Yield: This recipe makes 2 single-crust quiches.

Ingredients:
2 9 inch pie crusts (I love Trader Joe’s frozen pie crusts)
1 pound of bacon, crumbled
1 cup sliced green onions
1 cup chopped kale or spinach
1 cup Swiss cheese, shredded
1 cup Gruyere cheese, shredded
10 large eggs, beaten with a fork or blender
4 cups whole milk (ok), or half-and-half (better), or heavy cream (best!)
1 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
a pinch or two of freshly ground nutmeg

Mise en Place:

To prepare bacon:
Here’s an easy way to cook a pound of bacon without making a mess. Preheat oven to 375º. Place a sheet of parchment paper or foil on a 13 x 18-inch baking pan. Set the bacon on a cooling rack and place it over the lined baking pan. Cook bacon for about 15 minutes, or until golden brown. When done, throw parchment paper in the trash as soon as it is cool enough to handle, before it has a chance to stick to the bottom of the pan. No messy splatter to deal with or dirty pans.

Wash and slice green onions. Wash, spin, and chop kale leaves.

Instructions for putting it all together:

Preheat oven to 425º.

To make the custard: beat eggs together first and then add cream, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Place a single pie crust in each pie plate. Flute edges to make them look pretty. If using Trader Joe’s brand, keep the plastic wrap on the crust while you roll it out and transfer it from the countertop to the pie plate.

Layer pie ingredients as follows:
Bacon

Onions and Kale

Cheese

Egg Mixture

Bake pies at 425º to ensure that the pie crusts cook. Undercooked, doughy crusts are not very appetizing. After 20 minutes, lower the oven temperature to 350º to cook the custard interior. When you reduce the heat, take pies out of the oven and line their edges with foil or pie plate shields to keep crust rim from burning. Bake for about 25-30 minutes more. A knife inserted in the center should come out clean. Note to self: purchase another 9″ pie crust shield– they are so much easier to use than foil.

Let quiche rest about 15 minutes before serving. You can make the day before and reheat in the oven.

How big IS that egg, or a few words about egg sizes.

In the olden days, farmers would gather eggs from their hen houses and use this Jiffy Way Egg Scale to measure the egg’s weight and grade, from small to extra large, for marketing purposes.
My friend, Patty, gave me this scale with the marketing logo “DeKalb Chix” printed on it. I treasure it!

Our chicken eggs range in size from medium to extra large, so often times I have to weight them to get the right amount of eggs for a recipe.

Medium to extra-large.

A little more or less volume won’t matter with a quiche, but it would definitely matter with a cake or pastry recipe where the ratio of dry to liquid ingredients needs to be accurate. This recipe called for 20 ounces. I use my modern digital scale for weighing!

The more you know…

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Mom’s Pumpkin Pie

November 27, 2014November 22, 2020 ~ Judy's Chickens ~ 23 Comments

It is not Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie.

A few years ago, when my son was a Vanderbilt student, I asked if he wanted to invite friends over from school who couldn’t get home for Thanksgiving. About ten of his friends joined us. He asked if they needed to bring any food. I told him we had the meal covered, but if anyone enjoyed cooking and wanted to bring something, they should feel free to do so.

A few days later, he sent me an email with a headcount and said his friends had dessert covered. Wonderful. As I scrolled further into his letter, I noticed a copy of the letter he had sent his friends. It said, “My mother said if it’s part of your wellness to cook during the holidays, feel free to bring a dessert, otherwise just bring yourselves.” Part of your wellness, how nicely put. Cooking is part of MY wellness.

On Thanksgiving Day, as everyone arrived, the desserts were dropped off in the kitchen — coconut cake, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, mint ice cream. Alas, there was no pumpkin pie, my favorite. So now we get to the point of the story, my mother’s pumpkin pie. It is so easy; I was able to prep it with ingredients I had on hand in the amount of time it took to preheat the oven. The pie cooked while we ate dinner. No one was the wiser, and I had my beloved pumpkin pie.

Yield: Makes one 10-inch pie or one 9-inch deep-dish pie.

Ingredients:

3 large eggs
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup packed light brown sugar
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon fine salt
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1¾ cups pumpkin purée (15-ounce can)
1½ cups warm milk (heat for one minute in the microwave)

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 450º

2) Prepare pie crust. If you are using a 10-inch pie pan, you may need to roll the crust a little more to stretch it to fit better. I like to use Trader Joe’s Pie Crusts.

Technique Time: How to arrange a TJ’s pie crust into a pie pan:

Once the crust comes to room temperature, which takes about 90 minutes, unroll it retaining the plastic sheets. You will find that the dough breaks up into wide strips as you unroll it. Not a problem; use a rolling pin to rejoin the cracks while the dough is sandwiched between the plastic sheets. Next, remove the plastic covering from one side of the crust. Using the corners of the remaining plastic square, lift the crust, turn it over, and plop it into the pie plate. Continue to leave the plastic on as you press the dough into the pan, then remove the plastic.

Tuck crust edges under and crimp to make pretty.

3) Prepare Pumpkin Filling: Blend all ingredients together in a mixing bowl for one minute on medium-low speed. Be sure to warm the milk as this will decrease the cooking time. Scrape the sides and bottom of the mixing bowl with a spatula as you blend the ingredients together.

Pour filling into prepared pie crust.

For best results, cover the pie rim with foil or a Pie Crust Protector until the last 15 minutes of baking. While the pie is cooking, take a look at this post about must-have cooking tools, Stocking Stuffers: Tools for the Cooking Life

4) Bake for 10 minutes at 450º. Turn oven down to 350º and cook for 45-55 minutes, depending on whether you are using a regular or deep-dish pan. To check for doneness, prick the center of the pie with the tip of a knife. It should come out clean. If not, let the pie cook five more minutes and test again.

This pie is delicious served warm from the oven or cold from the refrigerator (for breakfast!).

My friend, Renée, skips the pie crust altogether and pours the pumpkin batter into small ramekins for single-serving desserts.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Other Desserts for Thanksgiving:
Mrs. Walker’s Cranberry Nut Pie
Mom’s Apple Pie (with a cheddar streusel topping)
Pumpkin Bread Pudding (with caramel sauce and whipped cream on top!)
Pumpkin Cheesecake Pie
Marion’s Crazy Good Pumpkin Bread with Chocolate Chips

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@judyschickens

Italian style meals, sustainable gardening tips, and lots of segues in between

Pies

Very Berry Clafoutis

Quiche Lorraine with Bacon and Kale

Mom’s Pumpkin Pie

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