Cherry tomato clafoutis

As predicted, following up my last post has been difficult.  The past month been busy, and I haven't had much time for anything more than everday cooking.  A few new things have been tried.  An easy stir fry of braised red cabbage, pancetta and peas that works equally well as a main course or a colorful side dish.  A delicious lemon curd layer cake that went over a treat with colleagues and family.  Nothing that seemed like a worthy successor to the pie chart pie, but I'll never blog again if I keep thinking that way, so I have decided to (re)start afresh with something simple that I made over the Easter weekend: a cherry tomato clafoutis.

A clafoutis is traditionally a sweet dessert, most commonly made with cherries.  However, a recent edition of Good Housekeeping included a recipe for a savoury version which looked good, so we decided to try this out to accompany our barbecued chicken.  It's incredibly simple, but works very well and is aesthetically appealing (at least until you serve it - then it collapses somewhat).


Cherry tomato clafoutis

 60g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
3 large eggs
100 ml milk
3 tbsp shredded fresh basil leaves, plus extra to garnish
150g cottage cheese
250g cherry tomatoes
salt and pepper to taste, if desired


Mix together the flour, baking powder, eggs, milk and seasoning.  Then whisk in the basil and the cottage cheese.

Pour the mixture into a shallow baking dish (that can hold about a litre), and arrange the cherry tomatoes in the mixture as you please.  You can either drop them in whole or slice them in half and add them, cut sides down.

Season the lot with black pepper and cook in an oven set to 180 degrees C for about half an hour until the egg is a golden colour and has set.  Garnish with the remaining basil and serve.  Depending on how many people are dining, this could either work as a main course, with a green salad on the side, or as a side dish to accompany meat.  Either way, it passes my mother's 'back pocket' test and will certainly be made again!

Empty cupboard salmon and vegetable frittata

We've discussed the value of back pocket recipes, of those 'what to eat when there's nothing (or almost nothing) to eat' meals that work out so well but often can't be recreated.  Usually those 'what to eat' evenings have me scouring the cupboards for tins and packets, and the freezer for vegetables that will add colour and another of those all important five-a-day items to my mish mash meal.

Our grandparents solved the 'what to eat' evenings with bread and dripping and a hot cup of strong tea.  The fate of so many made alarming cardiac statistics fifty years ago.  Our parents' generation was a little more switched on to nutritional values and health issues and their taste buds were not about to be insulted with dripping, so they went for scrambled egg on toast.  It's a good standby, comfort food of the highest order and makes a great breakfast, but feeding two hungry men and a moderately hungry woman after a long day can't adequately be done with breakfast food.  Why not have a bowl of cornflakes and be done with it?

Yet eggs have all kinds of beneficial properties and they are enormously versatile.  Whipping up a quiche is all well and good but this isn't about quiche:  now we're talking odd items which need to be combined into a cohesive and palatable whole.

Enter FRITTATA:  easy, quick, endlessly versatile and elastic when it comes to amounts. 

My inclination would have been to put a tin of tuna into this one, but I discovered to my surprise and dismay that Kit had scarfed the one tin of tuna in a sandwich a few days ago so all I had in the arsenal was a tin of salmon.  So be it.  A root round in the fridge produced a few more ingredients and away I went to produce



Salmon and vegetable frittata

I've tried to get the amounts in some reasonable proportion but really, as long as you can adequately cover the base with the egg topping/filling, the gram amounts are not too important.


5 good sized potatoes, peeled, sliced and boiled
200g mushrooms, sliced finely and sauteed in a mix of olive oil and butter
2 green onions (more if you like onion), chopped finely
200g cherry tomatoes, halved
1 - 240g tin red salmon, drained and flaked
5 -7 eggs beaten lightly with 150 ml milk (the more eggs the more milk)
100g grated cheese (cheddar is as good as any but really any mild cheese will do)

 
Assemble ingredients and then layer first four in a greased oblong casserole dish.  Pour egg mixture over all and let it run into the corners, then sprinkle grated cheese on top.  Bake in a 190ºC oven for 15 - 20 minutes until cheese is melted and slightly brown and the whole has a 'set' look to it.  The above amounts serve four comfortably.

Apologies, dear readers, to the strict vegetarians among you.  It will be just as good if you leave out the salmon and add another vegetable.  But I've included this recipe in the Vegetarian section of the index simply because it doesn't fit neatly with the fish category (have we even got one yet?) and it so easily could be a veggie option.