hope in the kitchen

I think if I had fresh ingredients available to me all the time, I could be an amazing cook. Well, fresh ingredients and the time to actually experiment in the kitchen. Yesterday, feeling guilty about stomping all over the fallen prunes (plums) in my yard, I picked as many as I could reach without climbing a ladder. As soon as I brought them inside, I realized I had no idea what to do with them. Then I remembered about a French dessert that my friend Cécile taught me to make several years ago. Un clafoutis is a sort of custard pie, made with milk, flour, sugar, eggs, a pinch of salt, a dab of butter, and some fresh fruit - usually cherries or plums. I searched the cookbooks in the house, and found a recipe this afternoon. It even says facile in the directions. No problem, right? Uh yeah, right...

Challenge #1: how to measure ingredients. French recipes call not for cups and teaspoons of flour and milk, but grams and centiliters. I found spoons in the drawer, but they were for milliliters. Are centiliters and milliliters the same thing, students? Nathalie has a scale to measure the grams of sugar and flour, but the recipe called for 2 tasses, or cups, of milk. I was stumped. In the end, I just guessed how much milk I needed, because I knew the batter should be fairly runny.

Challenge #2: the oven. French kitchens tend to be smaller than American ones, and ovens can be quite small. Mine is small enough that it's stored under the kitchen sink. All I have to do is put it on the counter, plug it in, and go. Minor problem solved.

Challenge #3: the oven uses Celsius. I didn't think this would be a problem since I'm in France, following a recipe from a French cookbook in French. Reading the recipe, I was reminded that many French ovens just have a numbered setting 1, 2, 3, 4...no specific temperature was provided. What to do? I had already mixed all of my ingredients and was not ready to abandon my dessert. Fortunately, there are illustrations on the oven door, and I decided that the picture of a tarte tatin was the closest thing to the type of item I was baking. 30 minutes at 260'. I put it in and crossed my fingers...

And after 30 minutes, a moment of panic when my clafoutis was inflated and spilling over the sides of the dish. While I ran upstairs to get my camera, it settled down. And the best part? Even though it's not the most beautiful French dessert, it tasted pretty much like I'd remembered. Two consecutive days of successful cooking? There may be hope for me yet...