Clafoutis

So I finally got around to making clafoutis! Being in the land of dessert cups that put pudding and jelly to shame, we did try some individual pre-made clafoutis last year and found it - underwhelming. I made a note to try it myself, then by the time we got settled and acquired some basic baking equipment, cherries were out of season!

Now, yes, you can make clafoutis with other fruits. And yes, people will by and large call it a *fruit name* clafoutis. But the classic is with cherries.

So, finally set up. Finally have time. But too late. Cherries were already done for this year. No matter, I'll try with another fruit and hope to have time to attempt with cherries just before we leave next spring. It's a rare rainy weekend and not too hot, so a perfect day for summer baking.

Until! Ha ha!!!

Went to the farmer's market this morning and saw... CHERRIES!!! Ripe, plump, dark, juicy, deliciously fresh local cherries. An upside to living near the mountains is that the altitude delays some fruits. So while the sea level cherries have come and looong gone, the ones at 800m have just started!

Next: what is clafoutis? It's a dessert that basically consists of a bunch of cherries with flan batter poured over them and baked. You can make it with other fruits, apricots or raspberries being popular, but if you want to be technical about it, making it with stone or pome fruit - especially apples - makes it a flaugnarde.*

And yes, the cherries are often left whole so you do need to pay attention when eating. While the fact that is makes prep much faster is a perk I doubt anyone would deny, the idea is that the stones release just a bit of amygdalin - that wonderful bitter almond flavour - into the dish, giving the clafoutis more depth and complexity. People who are nervous can find recipes using pitted cherries and an optional dash of almond extract.

I used a recipe from Marmiton, which is a lot like a french equivalent to AllRecipes.

Final verdict? Easy and quick to make. Forgiving recipe. Very tasty. Waaaay better than the premade ones. That being said, I'm the kind of person who doesn't even like dealing with seeds in a watermelon wedge so I really didn't enjoy picking around the stones.
It was also much better warm than cold as some butter separated out and pooled in the wells made by the cherries. Not a big deal warm, but once chilled, it meant lots of little bits of solid butter. Not pleasant. This could be because of the recipe, though.
I will definitely make a clafoutis again, but I'd try another recipe and remove the pits, complexity and ease of prep be darned. If I ever hit on a five-star recipe, I will share it here.

*I did see one recipe with apples calling it a "clafoutis tatin" which is a pretty clever description.

Beer in Provence

The French - or at least the southern French - surprise me sometimes though every time, it really shouldn't. These are the people from the sophisticated-yet-simple land of wine. Want to get crazy? Ooh, bubbly wine! Add a splash of crême de cassis and call it a Kir! Madness!

Because once something isn't under the revered mantle of AOC or AOP, they're not afraid to play with flavour combinations or to bring influences of their childhood into adult life.

Enter: beer.

Now, the fact that I don't like beer probably has a lot to do with why I'm only discovering this now. Alongside the grocery store aisle laden with mostly lagers and the odd pack of Guinness, there are beers flavoured with raspberry, cherry, tequila, or wormwood. And there's a thing called Panaché which I finally found out is half beer, half lemonade.

Ok, cool.

Now, have I mentioned the French love of the "sirop"?  No drink crystals here. Ask for Kool-Aid and get a blank stare. But sirop - quite literally flavoured sugar syrup, with some real fruit for the fancy brands -  aah. Sirop will have almost an entire aisle devoted to it with flavours like strawberry, grenadine, lemon, grapefruit, grape, cola, mint, orgeat (bitter almond), aniseed, violet, and so on! The idea is you put a splash of it in water or fizzy water to make a flavoured drink for kiddies. Very common on kids menus at restaurants "includes a main course, a soda or sirop, and a scoop of ice cream" or for drizzling on top of shaved ice for a granita (what I would call a snow cone.)

A couple shelves of the sirops on offer at the small-but-awesome Monoprix in town.
They allowed me to take photos on condition I didn't show prices, hence the award winning editing here.

Now we've got sirop covered.

Tonight, I asked about something on the menu and discovered beer-meets-sirop. In this case grenadine (though lemon and strawberry were also popular, I'm told) was mixed with whatever was on tap and I'm not quite sure what happened or if it was right, but...

I liked it.

Picture a grown-up Shirley Temple in beer form with a bubble gum pink tinted head of foam from the garishly red grenadine. No orange wedge or maraschino cherry, sadly, but mind-bending and oddly satisfying.

I wonder what other beer-based surprises lay in wait.