Slightly Regrouped

It wasn't just the pie, but that definitely had something to do with it.  It might have been the four day weekend.  Or maybe staying home with our modern family (our friends) did it for me. Quite possibly it was simply sleeping for more than 5 hours a night.  Whatever it was, I can feel some of my mojo coming back. And yes, this pie had a lot to do with it.

Maple makes me happy.  In a delirious sort of way.  I fully admit to taking swigs of maple syrup from the bottle.  I will find any excuse to include it in a recipe from baked beans to oatmeal cookies to lamb stew with dumplings. The sight of a real sugar maple is enough to make me start salivating. So this Rustic Maple Pecan Pie indeed made me happy.

It made me happy to read about it in the first place.  It made me happy to make it yesterday afternoon while the rest of the house napped.  It made me happy to share it with our close-knit friends after a raucous Thanksgiving dinner.  And it is making me happy to share it with you.  

Thank-you to Aimée at Under the High Chair for letting me share this with you. Use your favourite pie crust, I went with my standard Pate Brisée.

Rustic Maple Pecan Pie

(courtesy of  Aimée's Auntie Lynn)

1 unbaked 9 inch pie shell

2 eggs

3/4 cup brown sugar

2 tablespoons flour

1 cup pure maple syrup

2 tablespoons butter, melted

1/2 chopped pecans (I used a bit more than that)

1 teaspoon pure vanilla

1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

2.  Beat eggs in a medium sized bowl.  Stir flour into brown sugar and add to eggs. Mix well. Stir in remaining ingredients.

3. Pour into pie shell and bake for 40 minutes.

4. Serve with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.  And more maple syrup drizzled on top.

Pears, Pears, and More Pears

While I'm not sure if any food makes me as happy as a warm strawberry plucked right off the plant I must admit that this pear comes deliriously close. It isn't quite right off the tree, but you don't want that anyway. Rather, a pear does better with a few days on the kitchen counter to mellow into its juicy, sexy sweetness. In the case of this pear it excelled with a couple of days in the Mission Hill Family Estate kitchen, a 7 hour drive in the backseat, and a few more sultry days on our kitchen counter.  Then it turned into a TV star.

Before we ventured to the Okanagan last week I booked my first TV appearance on Breakfast Television. The timing was perfect and I spent some of our time at the Penticton Farmers' Market searching for the perfect pears to bring home. The pears at the market were perfect, if I wanted to eat them that day.  Our guide, Matt Batey, heard my lament and offered up some Mission Hill pears.  They'd been picked the day before and would I like to stop by the Estate and pick them up when we were on our way home?

What a no brainer.  Of course, it meant that we didn't get home in time for the girls' bedtime. Ah, they'd hardly noticed we were gone anyway.

After days of touring around the Naramata Bench and visiting people in their homes, garages, and vineyards it was quite a shock to our senses to arrive at the Mission Hill Family Estates sprawling grounds.  From the second you pass through the gates at the end of a residential drive the entire experience is choreographed. You pass through the keystone (above) and enter the grounds.  Your view is filled with the sky, lake, and mountains behind, all framed by the Terrace restaurant, Bell Tower, Visitor Center, and the overwhelming feeling of luxury.

Then Matt greeted us in his chef whites and brought us back to reality with a tour of the gardens, kitchen, and food experience of Mission Hill.  The place may be all about the wine, with gardens and menus built to frame that wine, but the passion in the food and in Matt was evident.  I am dying to go back and try a winemaker dinner or culinary workshop. Another trip...

Here is Matt in the garden.  One of the fascinating things about the gardens here was that they are planted by grape varietal. It was like food and wine pairing for idiot cooks.  Well, probably a bit fancier than that. But in case you didn't know, Chardonnay works with cilantro, lily, corn, beans, squash, mint, and yes, pears.

Then there were the pears.  After pulling out a few crates Matt and I packed out one full crate of Bartletts, Bosc, and Asian pears to take home. Thank-you Matt, you're just lucky that they survived the drive home. He and Hubby seem to share a certain propensity for big, bad cars and heavy feet.

Yes, that is the seatbelt getting good use on the Old Okanagan Highway. No carseats on this trip, but safety always comes first!

So my precious beauties arrived home safely.  They were the perfect inspiration for the some lovely dishes. Hubby watched the girls last night and I baked, kneaded, and chopped to prep for this morning's BT appearance. I made Pear, Gorgonzola, and Carmelized Onion Pizza, Asian Pear Slaw, Upside Down Pear Gingerbread Cake, and Cardamon Hand Pies. The Monster helped me with the ultimate recipe, the Honey Pear Cheesecake.  It was a good thing she helped me last night because apparently she had a fit this morning watching me on TV.  "I want to bake a cake with Mama on TV!"  Maybe next time, Sweetie.

Honey Pear Vanilla Cheesecake

(Serves 10-12)

2 cups graham cracker crumbs (or crushed Nilla wafers, gingersnaps, or plain biscotti)

¼ cup butter, melted

2 tbsp sugar

3 (8 ounce) blocks of cream cheese, room temperature

½ cup honey

3 large eggs

1 vanilla bean

¾ cup pear puree or ½ cup pear nectar

½ cup flour

1 pear, peeled and finely diced

1 cup sour cream (optional)

¼ cup honey (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Boil a full kettle of water.

2. Mix together the cookie/cracker crumbs, sugar, and melted butter until the consistency of wet sand. Press into a 9 inch springform pan, across the bottom and coming up the sides slightly.  Bake for 15 minutes.  Cool slightly and wrap the bottom of pan in two overlapping layers of aluminum foil.

3. Combine cream cheese and honey and beat until smooth.  Add the eggs, one at a time, incorporating after each addition. Slice the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and using the back of a small paring knife scrape the seeds from the bean.  Add the seeds to the cream cheese mixture along with the pear puree or nectar and the flour.  Mix until smooth. Finally, stir in the diced pear.

4. Pour the batter into the prepared crust and place in the springform pan in a larger pan. Transfer to the oven.  Before closing the oven door pour water from the boiled kettle into the larger pan until it comes about halfway up the sides of the springform pan.

5. Bake for 45-55 minutes, until the cheesecake seems firm but still slightly wiggles in the center.  Turn off the oven and close the oven door.  Keep in the oven for another 60 minutes. Remove and cool completely in the fridge.

6. Optional topping: Before serving mix together the sour cream and ¼ cup honey.  Pour over the cheesecake. (A nice touch or a way to disguise surface cracks.)

(Doesn't Dave Kelly look so enraptured by something?  Probably not me or my pears  - although I did manage to call them sexy on morning TV - but the segment went well.)

Eden in the Dust

So we finally get our grass in, our fence up, and have even hosted dinner once or twice. Then the City and Volker Stevin show up. They tore up part of our new front lawn, ripped apart the alley around our entire blocks, and now use our yard as the traffic line between alley and front street. Oh, and did I mention that my yard is surrounded by giant 20 foot deep holes? The noise and dust are constant. Thank goodness the girls can sleep through it. I only wish I could.

For two little kids the continual movement of machinery and big men is rather fascinating. We can watch at the window for hours and whenever we are heading out to the park or the men are taking a break we investigate the most recent digging. Apparently it is quite an ordeal to move a fire hydrant across the street. I can be amused by some new-to-me truck, but that's where my enthusiasm ends.

Then the pastry arrived.

Yesterday we shared some fresh cookies (baked to take the autumn chill off the house in the morning) with the builder men. The Monster was quite disappointed that not all of them were taken. Try explaining Ramadan to a 3 year old. Any and all sadness disappeared when one of the guys let her go in the giant hole today. And all my annoyance with the noise quickly shot out the backdoor when one guy arrived this afternoon bearing a tray of phyllo pastry. He insisted that we take half of it, and then more because some pieces were small.

At first we thought it was a variation on baclava. Phyllo spinkled with pistachios and honey. It seemed like a safe guess. Then we bit into it. The phyllo triangles are actually filled with some sort of mildly sweet, thick custard. It is not the same as the filling in a cannoli, being quite smooth and not tasting of cheese. But it also isn't like a typical pastry cream, being thicker and quite white in colour.

Unfortunately, our delivery guy couldn't tell us what was in it. Any clue out there?

Impress Your Girlfriends

The next time you've got friends coming over for dinner or brunch and are worried about impressing them, make this dish.  You will look like a star, with 10 minutes of effort.  Just 10 minutes.  It works for mother-in-laws too.

This is the humble clafoutis.  See, it even has a fancy French name (pronounced kla-foo-TEE). It's not a showstopper cake topped with ganache.  Nor is it a buttercream topped cupcake.  And nay, it is not a labor-intensive pie. Just a simple clafoutis.

It does look good, though, right?

Traditionally a clafoutis is made with cherries, and nothing but cherries.  But we came home from a weekend visiting family facing a limited supply of groceries. I had a lot of apricots and a lot of cherries.  With just a few other simple ingredients we had dinner.

Yes, I said dinner.  We had a late lunch on the way into town so this is what we ate before the girls went to bed. I whipped it up, stuck it in the oven while we finally hung the swing Smilosaurus got for her birthday.  After the tantrums started I took the ridiculously good smelling 'pancake' out of the oven and we promptly ate it all but one piece.  And that one was eaten Nigella style at 3 am by me.

It really is an easy recipe.  All you need is a blender and a pie plate. Smilosaurus even pushed the button on the bender for me. Without any effort you can have dessert, or my favourite concept, brunch. 

And the taste?  It is described as a pancake or custard.  I thought it was more crepe like, but a bit heavier. Baked custard? Just know that it isn't pie, cobbler, crisp, crumble or buckle. It is clafoutis.

As I said, I used apricots and cherries, but any stone fruit or berry would work. Perhaps peaches and raspberries or plums, apricots, and nectarines. The recipe is based on one I found during Summer Fest, and comes from good ol' Martha.

Fruit Clafoutis

(serves 4-6)

1/2 cup vanilla sugar

2/3 cup milk

1/3 cup heavy cream

3 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

2/3 cup flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 cups sliced fruit

1. Peel and slice fruit (peaches, plum, or apricots into 6-8 slices and cherries in half). Set aside.

1. Butter a 9 inch pie dish and dust with a tablespoon of sugar. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Blend all ingredients except for the fruit in a blender for a minute.

3. Pour half the custard mixture into the prepared pie plate.  Arrange fruit on top and pour the rest of the custard over the fruit.

4. Bake for 45-55 minutes, until the top is golden brown and puffy.

Serve warm or cold with whipped cream.