Is there any dessert more easy to assemble — and fun to say — than a clafoutis? You simply combine your batter ingredients, tumble fruit into a buttered dish, pour in the batter and bake. The result: an eggy, puddinglike cake studded and stained with pockets of sweet-sour fruit.
This new raspberry-almond clafoutis from David Tanis swaps the usual all-purpose flour for almond flour, making for a cake that has a bit more heft and a softly floral almond flavor. David reaches for raspberries here, but you could use other berries or pitted cherries. Use it to cap off your next dinner party, or — as is often the case when I cook up a clafoutis — throw it together on a Saturday morning for breakfast and snack away all weekend.
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Raspberry-Almond Clafoutis
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Before we leave clafoutis country, I want to share this savory version with corn and swiss chard by Melissa Clark. A good dose of Gruyère provides salt and nuttiness, and sautéed leeks boost the “silky vegetable” quotient.
In yesterday’s Cooking newsletter, Sam Sifton encouraged us to roast a chicken this weekend — summer and its oven-prohibiting temperatures will be here soon enough. I find it’s never a bad idea to do as Sam says, so I’m eyeing this roasted orange chicken from Genevieve Ko, a cross between savory Cantonese soy-sauce chicken and tangy American Chinese orange chicken. Tangerine wedges, peel and all, roast alongside the chicken, becoming soft and lending their juice to the syrupy glaze. True, we’re not in peak citrus season anymore, but that’s all the more reason to blast your tangerines (or clementines or mandarins) in a hot oven with soy sauce and brown sugar.
It will also soon be too hot to deep-fry anything, meaning now is the time for shrimp tempura, that perfect marriage of sweet, plump shrimp and salty, crispy crust. As Naz Deravian explains in the notes for her recipe, using seltzer in the batter adds air; chilling the ingredients, including the flour, prevents gluten formation and makes the dish more delicate and light.
More meals for this almost-summer moment: David Tanis’s cheese-topped cauliflower steaks combine warm-weather flavors (piquant olives and anchovies) with cold-evening comfort (roasted cauliflower, melted cheese). As does this creamy polenta with snappy asparagus, peas and mint, a gorgeous vegetarian main from Melissa Clark.
We started with dessert, so let’s end with salad, specifically Ali Slagle’s quinoa salad. Studded with cucumber, bell pepper, parsley and olives and tossed with a bracing lemon dressing, it’s a sort of Greek-y, tabbouleh-y quinoa salad. Make a big batch on Sunday for pat-yourself-on-the-back lunches on Monday and Tuesday.
