A few festive fruit ideas for Christmas and the holidays

On Christmas Day it will be ten years since Harvey died. I've been going back through my posts for this time of year, recalling all the different Christmases and holidays I had with him, and then without him, and reminding myself what we and our friends were cooking and eating.

For Harvey, Christmas meant a roast, which he would cook, although over the years we shifted the timing from late lunch to early dinner. All we needed to decide was what kind of roast - pork, lamb, beef fillet, or ducks - and what would accompany it. 

Befores varied a lot, depending on who brought them - often seafood appeared. Afters could also vary to some extent. Usually one of our regulars would bring her always splendid choice of what we all knew as the Light Dessert, but every so often someone else stepped in, with a different repertoire.

The final course was fixed: Edmonds' Rich Christmas Pudding, made by me in November. The only problem was that it had to be steamed for another two hours before we ate it. After all the food and wine I'd had by then, I had a bit of trouble remembering to put it on in time, or making the brandy sauce without sloshing in too much brandy.

Now each year is different, depending on circumstances and how Jonathan and I feel. I unearthed a pretty good selection of ideas for delicious afters involving the season's wealth of fruit. So I thought I'd gather some of these together, as they might give you some inspiration too.

First up, strawberries - really good this year. Harriet Harcourt showed me how to make the most of their colour, shape and flavour by cutting them into little heart-shaped slices and drying them in the oven. The taste is essence of strawberry.

You can use them in lots of ways. Here they are piled up on toasted panettone for a superb breakfast.

By the way, leftover panettone, should you manage to have any, makes the best bread and butter pudding in the world.

I regularly supply my neighbour with cooked rhubarb for his breakfast, but this week he got the Christmas edition: rhubarb with strawberries. It's a brilliant combination, especially with ice cream.

Then there are cherries - again, extra good this year. I had never eaten any until Harvey bought some for us. On our first holiday together we went down to Central Otago and spent a blissful morning up in the trees, picking them ourselves, and of course eating them as we went. Except for my 10-year-old son Patrick - when he came down with his haul, he asked us tentatively if he could eat one. So we sent him back up the tree for the little treat he'd missed. 

Of course they're perfect as they are - but you can do some stunning things with them too, such as making that very simple French classic, clafoutis, or just cooking them in red wine.

 

That post with the cherries in red wine also shows how blueberries (I found them on a good special this week), cooked in red wine and balsamic vinegar, make a superb relish for ham (or turkey).

As a final flourish, here's a simple way to produce little fruit mince tarts with less sugar than usual - although in honour of Harvey, I always lace the mincemeat with a good dash of whisky first.

Sweetheart cherries

I've been down in Central Otago, picking cherries for only the second time in my life - the first was with Harvey and the boys in 1980. When Patrick came down with his bucket, he asked us if he could eat one now. So we sent him back to eat as many as he wanted.

There's a recipe for cherry clafoutis here. But it would have been a crime to cook these ones.

The last of the cherries

Well, the last for me this year - they're still in the shops, but I won't buy any more because I'm off to China soon, leaving a friend to house-sit. I'm trying to work out how I can post from there, but it may not work...
      When one of my visiting English friends admitted that he loved dessert, I looked at my half-full box of cherries and thought, "clafoutis". Clafoutis is basically a thick pancake-like batter poured over cherries and baked in the oven. You can use other fruit, but technically it's then not a clafoutis, but a flaugnarde (another lovely word).
      Clafoutis comes from clafir, an Occitan word meaning "to fill". Occitan isn't a French dialect, it's a very old separate Romance language which was once spoken and written across a large area, ranging from northern Spain up into southern France, centred on the Limousin, and part of Italy. Medieval troubadours sang in Occitan. But it was progressively suppressed by French rulers intent on imposing one language and identity. Today it's being enthusiastically revived, though it still has no official status in France (unlike Spain and Italy).
       I haven't made one of these remarkably easy desserts for a long time, but I was pretty sure it was a simple recipe. And it is - but Mastering the Art of French Cooking, as usual, explains exactly how to get the best results.
        Opinions differ about whether you should take out the cherry stones or pits. I think the clafoutis looks much better if you don't (besides being easier). Apparently the traditional version does leave the pits in, because they're said to release a wonderful flavour when cooked, whereas taking the pits out makes the taste milder.

Clafoutis 
(from Julia Child et al., Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961)
(This recipe worked perfectly in a 28cm square ceramic stovetop-to-oven dish.) 

1 and 1/4 cups milk
1/3 cup white sugar
3 eggs
1 Tb vanilla extract
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 cup standard white flour, scooped and levelled

2-3 cups black cherries
another 1/3 cup sugar

icing sugar n a shaker for topping
a baking dish (metal or ceramic) which can go from the hob to the oven.

Preheat the oven to 180C (on bake, no fan).

Place all the ingredients except the cherries in a blender in the order listed. Cover and blend at top speed for 1 minute. (If you don't have a blender, work the eggs into the flour with a wooden spoon, then gradually beat in the liquids and other ingredients, and strain the batter through a sieve.)

Pour a 1/2 cm layer of batter into the dish. Set over a moderate heat for a minute or two until a film of batter has set in the bottom. Remove from heat and spread the cherries evenly over the thin layer of batter (which will hold them in place and stop them rolling around). Sprinkle over the second 1/3 cup of sugar.

Pour over the rest of the batter. Place in the middle of preheated oven and bake for about an hour (mine took a little less than this, about 45 minutes). The clafoutis is done when it has puffed and browned a little, and a thin knife or skewer stuck in the middle comes out clean.

It can be served hot or warm (I think it's better warm). It will sink down slightly as it cools. Shake icing sugar thinly over it just before serving (I forgot the icing sugar, but I'm not convinced it's absolutely necessary).We had a little creamy plain yoghurt with ours, or you can have cream, or just eat it on its own. This recipe is supposed to serve 6-8, but I'm afraid ours just nicely served four - tant pis.

A fruity New Year to you

Blueberries
New Year's Eve: dinner at Lesley and Paul's. Lesley is (unlike me) a talented gardener, and every year - even in Wellington - she gets a great crop of blueberries. For our dinner she'd cooked them with red wine and balsamic vinegar to make a beautiful relish for her succulent ham (which followed Paul's home-smoked salmon). I didn't get the recipe, but it would be easy to experiment.

Cherries

New Year's Day: dinner with my French friend Diane. French cheese and an enticing variety of cold cuts with salad. The dessert was my contribution: a wide shallow dish of tiramisu, with cherries poached in red wine (the last of the third box I've managed to eat my happy way through this year). This is a distillatin of various recipes. In some you're supposed to destone them, but I don;t have the correct implement (does anyone???) and after trying one I decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Besides, they look so much prettier left whole - and it meant we could play the French equivalent of "tinker, tailor", though it turns out to be a bit more cynical: "marié, pendu, cocu" (married, hung, cuckolded").

Cherries in red wine

500g fresh cherries (destalked and, if you insist, destoned)

1 cup red wine (grenache is good)

1/2 cup white sugar (I used a little less, I think it's better less sweet)

A little vanilla (a pod with scraped seeds if you have it, or a 1/4 tsp vanilla paste, or a dash of essence - I had some vanilla syrup, so I used a splash of that)

Heat the wine and dissolve the sugar in it. Add the vanilla, then the cherries. Poach over a gentle heat for about 5 minutes (they should be cooked but not squishy). Remove the cherries with a slotted spoon.

Raise the heat and reduce the liquid to a syrup (be careful not to overdo this stage). Pour the syrup over the cherries and leave to cool. Delicious with any light creamy dessert (lemon mousse is good) or just with vanilla ice cream.

Rhubarb
Because the rhubarb Ali brought me has been doing so well in its pot, she told me I was allowed to start picking it now, instead of leaving it for another few months. So I very cautiously twisted off the two biggest stalks.

Not enough on their own, so I added an apple and put them at the bottom of the oven in a ceramic backing dish, with port and brown sugar, while I cooked something else. When the oven needed to eb turned off they were cooked, but there was too much liquid, so I left the dish in the oven to attend to later. Mistake. Next evening I turned the oven to 200C for roast veges, forgetting all about the fruit until I smelt burning sugar. Out came a sad-looking dark brown lump of amalgamated fruit.

I was going to throw it away, but first I broke off a bit and tasted it. Amazing - a sort of chewy fruit toffee. So I added a bit of water to soften it and tried a lump next morning with my muesli, milk and yoghurt. It was sensational, still slightly sharp but with a rich caramel flavour. I'm going to do it again, only better controlled this time so it doesn't look quite so much like a burnt offering. There are six more stalks waiting in the fridge...