Apple walnut clafoutis

Before I started blogging I had never heard of clafoutis, let alone tasted one. But I kept seeing gorgeous examples of this incredibly versatile and yet so easy dish around the internet quite often until I decided it was time to try it for myself. The first clafoutis I mad was of the traditional kind. I have read that “historically” clafoutis are made with cherries, so that is what I did for making my first clafoutis. And it was delicious but I thought at the time that it could be better. I think in all likelyhood that it

Clafoutis

was the cherries that were to blame here as they were not as sweet as I like my cherries to be.

So when I read about the Monthly Mingle subject for this month being “Brunch” I figured I would make another clafoutis. What better dish to serve at a brunch then a lovely clafoutis which can be eaten warm or cold? Perfect!

Given that it is apple season I wanted to make an apple version and thought that walnuts would go well as well as cinnamon. Basically apple pie flavors but without the apple pie… And delicious it was! I mean; the cherry clafoutis was nice, but this one was ten times better in terms of taste!! Now I truly love apple and cinnamon together. The smell alone of cinnamon makes me truly happy. It brings back childhood memories of mum baking apple pie (the only thing she ever baked apart from cake I think..lol ) and autumn in general. We always went to an orchard that I believe was owned by the company my dad worked for and each autumn we would receive loads of apples, so naturally they had to be put into something or eaten as is. So apple pie it was…

Ingredients:

• About 3 or 4 apples
• 2 large eggs + 1 yolk
• 1/2 cup blond cane sugar (100 gr)
• 1 oz cornstarch (16 gr)
• 1 oz all purpose flour (16 gr)
• 7/8 cup whole milk, cold (200 ml)
• 1 vanilla, seeds removed
• 1/2 cup heavy cream (120 ml)
• walnuts, chopped
• ground cinnamon

Steps:

• Preheat your oven at 180 C.
• Peel the apples and cut into cubes or slices whatever you feel is best for the oven dish you are using
• Beat the eggs and yolk with the sugar.
• Add the vanilla seeds and mix.
• Dilute the cornstarch in the cold milk.
• Add the flour and cornstarch to the previous preparation, with the cream. Mix well until homogeneous. Add ground cinnamon to your liking.
• Grease small ramekins (or a larger dish) and sprinkle with sugar. Remove the excess.
• Divide the apple and walnuts between them and pour the cream over.
• Sprinkle with ground cinnamon and place in the oven for 40 to 45 min, until golden. Remove. Eat lukewarm or cold.
• When ready to serve, you can sprinkle chopped walnuts on top.

I think this particular dish is best served while still warm. It’s good when cold, but it is even better when still warm. I sprinkled it with icing sugar for the photo but that is not really necessary as it is sweet enough as it is!

So I am officially sending this to the Monthly Mingle !

Enjoy!

Pumpkin beef stew

There is something so comforting about typical fall food. It’s the smell, the colors but above all the taste that make it so. When I read about the three ingredients for the Royal Foodie Joust I just had to participate. It’s my first time in the Joust and I am not a star in making up my own recipes, so I figured that this would be a perfect opportunity to start practicing!

The three ingredients for this months joust where in the colors of Halloween; black and orange and the ingredients itself would be pumpkin, beer and sugar. So sitting with Tom in bed on our regular weekend ‘breakfast in bed’ we started brainstorming on what we could make with those three ingredients and it was Tom who actually came up with the idea to make a stew out of it (see honey, I promised I would give you all the credits!!) and the rest was really fairly simple.

I had never before used pumpkin to cook or bake anything, so the first thing we had to do was buy a pumpkin. We went to the Noordermarkt in Amsterdam where they have a lovely organic market, so that is where we bought pumpkins (yes, I bought two different ones, so expect at least one more pumpkin recipe soon!) and organically produced beef for our stew. For the beer  wanted to use stout as that is dark and lovely and all the other ingredients I still had in the kitchen so here is the recipe that we made:

Beefstew with beer and pumpkin (serves 2 or 3)

350 gr. beef

30 gr butter

4 small onions

Half a medium sized pumpkin

200 gr round carrots or another vegetable you like

1 bottle of Stout or another dark beer

5 cloves

1 pcs of mace

2 bay leaf

1 cinnamon stick

sugar to taste

Serve with mashed potatoes or rice (we picked the mashed potatoes)

Cut the beef in chunks of about 2 cm and put pepper and salt on them. Put the butter in a casserole pan and once the butter stops foaming add the meat. Bake the meat for about 10 minutes on medium high till it is browned.

2. Cut up 3 onions in rough pieces and add them to the meat. Bake for another 5 minutes. Add the bottle of beer.

3. Stick the cloves into the remaining onion (you can leave it whole, it will fall apart anyway) and add this together with the mace, bayleave and cinnamon stick to the meat. Bring to a boil, add pepper and salt and sugar to taste. You don’t want it to be overly sweet. Put a lid on the pan and simmer for approx. 2 hours. Add the carrots in and simmer for another half hour before you add the pumpkin. Simmer for another half hour and check if the meat is fall apart tender and the pumpkin well done.

You can add potatoes to the mix together with the pumpkin and have a one pot meal or you can make mashed potatoes and serve those on the site. Sprinkle some freshly grated nutmeg over the mashed potatoes!

You can easily make this dish the day before as the flavors will only get better after a day.

I could see endless variations of this dish really and the pumpkin and sugar give it a nice little bit of sweetness. While simmering on the stove the smells that came of it where delicious!! Especially the cinnamon was very noticeable. I did detect a very slight bitter aftertaste to the dish, which I somehow feel might be because of the cinnamon but not sure.

In any way, we were both really really pleased with this lovely stew and will definitely be making this again! Perfect for a rainy and stormy autumn day (well, it’s sunny here today… ) but you know what I mean.

So this is my official entry for the Royal Foodie Joust, hosted every month by the Leftover Queen. You can vote for me here after november 1st! Ofcourse you can always join as well in this fun event!