Elderberry clafoutis pie

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans! To our neighbors in the great white north, Happy Thanksgiving, 6 weeks late, and to our southern neighbors, feliz Día de la Revolución! Wherever you're from, I hope you're celebrating the harvest season with a sweet treat. 

Thanksgiving is one of the few occasions where I will attempt to bake. As a rule, I personally hate baking. It's more science than art--get something wrong and it generally won't work out at all, unlike cooking where almost any mistake can be mitigated, one way or another. Baking also generally involves a lot of steps, a lot of bowls, a lot of prep work, and significantly more time than cooking--all of these are things I hate. So, in our household, my husband generally does most of the baking, including all the Christmas baking of cookies, cherry coconut bars, and fudge. 

But my husband is a nurse and it's rare for him to get the entirety of Thanksgiving off.  And while Christmas baking can sort of be worked in in and around and throughout the holiday season, Thanksgiving dessert needs to be prepared on Thanksgiving Day, meaning it generally falls to me to make. I usually make a fruit cobbler or a fruit crisp, as they are easy, basically foolproof, and require some of the least prep work in the baking world. 

But for the past year, recipes for clafoutis have been popping up practically non-stop in my Pinterest feed, piquing my curiosity. 

Like a cobbler, a clafoutis involves basically 5 steps: grease a baking pan, layer in fruit, mix a bunch of things, spread on top, and bake. 

And, despite the town of McKinney clearing away much of the elderberry bushes in a part I frequent--why did they do this? They didn't replace it with anything--I still had several containers of the fruit in the freezer. So, I decided to try my hand at an elderberry clafoutis for this year's Thanksgiving. 

This recipe requires some special equipment:

• Blender
• Deep pie pan; my pan was around 1.5" deep and was barely enough. A 2" pan would be much better. 

Elderberry Clafoutis Pie 

• 2 cups fresh or frozen elderberries | If frozen, defrost and reserve the liquid
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup plain white flour
• 1 cup granulated sugar, divided into 3/4 and 1/4 portions* 
• 2/3 cup heavy cream or whole milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp almond extract
• 1/4 tsp salt
• Butter to grease the pan

1. Preheat the oven to 325
2. Grease a deep pie pan with butter.
3. Spread your elderberries out in the greased pan. 
4. Add any reserved elderberry liquid, the eggs, the flour, the 3/4 cup of sugar, the cream or milk, vanilla, almond and salt to the blender and liquify. 
5. Pour the mixture over the top of the elderberries--slowly, if you can. Sprinkle the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar over everything evenly.
6. Put the pan in the oven and bake for around 45 minutes until it puffs up and turns golden brown on top.

* This makes a lightly sweet clafoutis. Next time I would probably increase the sugar a little to offset the tartness of the elderberries more. I would also sprinkle the elderberries themselves with sugar in the pan. 

Right out of the oven

The result and what I would do differently next time

Elderberries float, which doesn't provide the intended 
layer effect

The elderberry clafoutis was tasty, but it did have the regular issues that any elderberry dish has, primarily being the crunchy elderberry seeds. There's no real way to work around these, unless you have a juicer and want to juice the berries first, so just be aware, your topping is going to be textural. 

The bigger issue is that I don't think that elderberries are right for a clafoutis because they are too small and too light. This means they float when you pour the liquid mixture over them. 

A clafoutis is supposed to come out as layers: crust on top, moist cake in the middle, and fruit on the bottom. But because of the floating, the finished product didn't have that layer effect. Instead, my fruit rose to the top (see pic) and became part of the crust. Still tasty, but not the intended result. 

Other than that, a great, lightly sweet dessert made with the kind of wild ingredients that would have been eaten by both the Native Americans and the early European settlers, though they likely would have been dried to make it into November. 

Elderberry honey mustard sauce: sweet, zesty, savory

With elderberry season winding down, I had been leaning towards a baked good of some kind with the last of the berries I was finding. But my husband had requested something savory, something he could put on grilled meat. Of all the foraged meals I've made him over the years, his favorite is still the Middle-Eastern inspired mulberry sauce.

I debated a lot of things, I was thinking a butter sauce of some kind--like a gastrique or something I've never really tried before, but in the end I decided to go with something more familiar--though I did end up adding butter in the end. 

It's been ages since I made a dijon sauce with fruit, not just from foraged ingredients, but in general. It's one of those things that's hard to mess up; just include some sweet (the fruit+ a little extra, since elderberries aren't super sweet), something a little spicy (the mustard) and something a little zesty (lemon) and a little acidic (vinegar) to cut through the richness. 

About a decade ago there was a recipe going around that was all the rage, called "man-pleasing chicken". Made with maple syrup, rice vinegar and dijon, it's basically the same concept you have here--and just as man-pleasing. 

With ingredients so minimal, you are going to taste each one to the fullest, so make sure to buy really good quality ingredients.

We enjoyed this sauce on grilled chicken for dinner, and also I had some on an open-faced ham and brie sandwich, which was to. die. for.

Elderberry honey dijon mustard sauce 

1 1/2 cups of elderberries

1/4 cup of stone-ground dijon mustard

1 1/2 Tbsp raw honey

1 Tbsp lemon zest

1 Tbsp lemon juice

1 Tbsp aged balsamic vinegar

1 pat grass-fed butter

Sauce right after whisking in the dijon,
reduce again by half after this, and whisk in butter

1. 
   Add the elderberries, lemon zest, lemon juice and 1 and 1/2 cups of water to a shallow sauté pan and bring to a low boil. Boil for two minutes, while smashing the berries. 
   
   
   
2. Add in the remaining ingredients, except the butter, and whisk vigorously. Bring to a low simmer and allow to simmer until reduced by half, whisking occasionally. Remember to scrape down the sides of the pan as needed. 
3. Add in the butter, whisk and continue to simmer until reduced by another half. Remove from heat and serve hot over meat or cheese. You can also store in the fridge and serve reheated or chilled.

In addition using as a sauce, I also mixed some with some red wine vinegar, salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil, and made a vinaigrette for a couple of salads. Not only was it tasty, it changed the chicken breast and feta cheese to a pretty shade of pink!

Easy 30 minute greenbriar ratatouille. Vegan, paleo, low carb, gluten-free, and low fat.

So clearly I've been on a Mediterranean kick lately, with a cleavers pesto last week (I've been enjoying the left-overs since), and a thistle Greek salad the other day. So when I was looking at an ENORMOUS haul of greenbriar shoots, it's really no surprise that my mind turned to ratatouille.

Ratatouille is a French dish, usually served in the summer because it's loaded with summer veggies: summer squash (zucchini/yellow squash), eggplant, and tomatoes. But it comes from the Provonce region, on the Mediterranean, where the cities of Marseille and Nice are located. It's a hearty, rustic stew, that just happens to be vegan, low carb, low calorie, low fat, dairy free, gluten-free and paleo; though it's often served with bread, you could also eat it as a side dish for meat, or over polenta or pasta.

The spirit of ratatouille is to make a healthy meal out of what's seasonally available, and while tomatoes aren't exactly in season, I did have a ton of spring greenbriar, so I decided to go for it. This dish involves caramelizing the onions, and since I enjoyed the greenbriar caramelized as a pizza topping last year, I thought this would be a slam dunk! It was fantastic, even my husband liked it, and he doesn't like REGULAR ratatouille! Best of all, the greenbriar cooks a lot faster than the traditional eggplant, turning an hour-long prep into a meal on your table in 30 minutes!

Thick and juicy, but still tender and bendable,
these greenbriars are at the perfect stage for eating.

Greenbriars, aka Similax species, are only edible in the early to mid-spring, because it's the young, new growth you eat. The shoots and young leaves are quite tasty, and because of some sugars in them, they also caramelize beautifully. They are fairly easy to ID, I wouldn't quite say beginner level, but definitely for a slightly experienced novice. Please check out my post on how to ID greenbriars.

Dijon Chicken with Foraged Juneberries in a Beurre Rouge

Been a little longer than I intended since my last post. My experiments with wild foods in the kitchen haven't really been post-worthy lately. I experimented with a dryad's saddle mock-meat, it was good, but needs more work. Some of the black locust blossom ideas I had came out just nasty, and had to be tossed.

So, back to revisit a dish I actually made last year, but didn't post about. Amelanchier, known locally as service berries, juneberries, shad bush, or saskatoon berries, are a native North American (generally) large bush or small tree. I say generally because there are also European and Asian varieties that have occasionally been planted here. All are edible, but the quality of the fruit varies.

Amelanchiers have very pretty, delicate white blossoms in the early to mid-sping, which lead to them frequently being planted as decoration. You can often find them in urban and suburban areas. My street, and the surrounding streets have them planted regularly between the road and the sidewalk.

Peasant-Style Foraged Nettle & Ham Bone Stew

Some weeks ago I stumbled upon this post for a recipe called "Green-as-Spring Veal Stew". The blog post was based on a recipe from a book called "Around My French Table" by Dorie Greenspan. After reading it over I knew I had to do a wild version of my own.

Vibrant & tasty wood nettles

There are many things I like about the original, and many more things I don't. The dish is clearly based on French peasant fare (which I love): it's rustic, simple, cooked long and slow, and very hearty. But then it veiered away from its roots, I think the author took it "upscale".

What I like about European peasant fare, or Southern Soul Food, or Western frontier food, or any number of others, is that you make do with what you have, use what is cheap, what is in season, and you make a lot out of a little. You don't waste, and you don't take anything for granted.