Savory Clafoutis

On the last day of my French class we all brought in something to eat. I brought good old American Brownies which were a hit. I am always asked for my brownie recipe by French people who eat them. They just taste different here for some reason. Our teacher brought in what I thought was a quiche but turned out to be a clafoutis. It hadn’t occured to me that you could use the recipe without sugar to make a dish. I really liked it and I like that you can throw it together without having to buy or make a crust. I found several recipes on-line-isn’t the internet great?!-and threw this together in minutes.

Roasted Vegetable Clafoutis

A variety of roasted vegetables. I used zucchini, onions, tomatoes and bell pepper. I would also have used egg plant if I had had any.

I roasted them with a little olive oil which I don’t think was necessary.

10gr butter-this is to butter the dish with
100gr flour-about 2/3 cup
3 eggs
2dl milk–1 cup
1/2dl cream-1/3 cup
25gr melted butter-about 3 Tabl.
breadcrumbs, salt, basil
grilled vegetables

I bought this handy-dandy device, hard to see what it does, which is an easy way to use either English measurements as above or French ones as they often weigh ingredients. That way I’m not trying to convert measurements-math is not my thing.

Preheat the oven at gas mark 6 (180°). Butter a deep pan with 10gr butter and breadcrumbs (chapelure)-I didn’t use the bread crumbs because my French teacher hadn’t. In a bowl mix the flour, eggs, the milk and cream, with the melted butter, the salt and the basil. Pour the mix in the pan and add the grilled vegetables (aubergines, peppers, zucchini etc). Bake in the oven for 40min or until ready.

Before. Right before baking it I decided to push in some cubed cheese and I sprinkled some parmesean cheese on top.

 After. Rather puffy. It goes down a little.

 Well, I have several things I would like to post about but for the moment I can’t post photos which is sort of my thing. Due to the high number of messages being left by spammers in the Czech Republic my son had to change my blog a little and I’ve discovered that I don’t have a clue on how to put up photos now. It is so irritating to have been using the computer for years and not know how to do certain things. When I am sitting next to either my son or Maurice’s son at a computer and watch them maneuver their way around the Internet I am amazed. I am about at the second grade level compared to them. So, my son says he will e-mail me instructions on how to post photos and, hopefully, I will soon be posting again.

As you can see by our fly swatter-called a tapette au mouche-which we bought at our local Ikea, it has had alot of use. Just about every time we kill a fly, and we do it often, another little piece of the swatter comes off. We had company this week-end, 5 people, and with all of the opening and closing of doors to get to the pool and the leaving open of windows upstairs, we had a bumper crop of flies inside, something which drives me nuts. The French look at me as being a little wacky but flies irritate me to no end. There also seem to be more flies than usual this summer. I’m not sure if this is because of the heat or what but it really gets to me. When we eat outside, before I set the table, I spray insect spray all around the circumference of the table to make a little magic circle to keep out the flies. It works for about 10 mintues or so although there are always a few kamakasi individuals who bust through the poison and dive bomb our food anyway.
When we first moved to this area I noticed little white snails all over everything, on plants, on the earth, on fences. They were thick everywhere. I never saw any up in our area but this summer, there they are. I wonder how they got up here? I can visualize a snail standing on the side of the road holding out its thumb for a ride up the mountain so they can get out at my yard and start munching on my plants. There must be some sort of passive migration, a hitch-hiking on birds or mammals to get up here. I don’t think they travel as spores do on the wind. I have seen really small snails on plants, barely the size of the head of a pin, on plants. I get out there and manually pick them off plants, spread around snail poison and wonder about them. I’ve heard you can put out plates of beer that will attract them and in which they will then drown. That sounds like alot of work to me, especially since we have so many plants on a large amount of land, plus I’d rather drink the beer myself.

Snails on our fence.

I have been outside every morning to beat the heat dead heading santalina. For some reason you have to cut off all of the flowers when they die. We don’t just have a few santalina–we have about 75 huge plants. I’ve been cutting off the flowers by hand but am contemplating getting some sort of hedge trimmer to do the job. Maurice has a weed eater that he tried on one plant but it really chewed it up and did damage to nearby plants so that’s out. I also have to cut the flowers off the lavender of which we also have many, probably 75 or so as well. It is a fragrant job and I think I should look for ways to use it, learn to make soap or something. I do try to save the little seeds that come off the flowers after it is cut to make some poupouri but I really am not an arts and crafts sort of person and don’t have the interest in doing much of this. After cutting all the flowers off of everything I am just ready to dump it all on our compost pile.