Oyyyyy Vey! Next Book...Coming Soon

Oh man, I haven't posted diddly squat since I published my last book. But that's because I've been working on my next book and not exactly thinking about randomly blogging into this here void.

Anywho, here's a sneak peak of a recipe from my next book, Some of That: Foraging in Seattle. My current plan is to make sure the book available in April on my Amazon author page.

Plum Excitement

(AKA Five Spice-Vanilla Plum Clafoutis)

Seattle is an excellent place to grow Italian prune plums because so many people have planted the trees and forgotten about them. Once you have your “plum eyes” on, you will be excited to find the trees dropping so much beautiful fruit! Ask your neighbors if you can harvest their fruit— maybe you can thank them later with a bite of this custardy plum dish if you don’t mind them suddenly wising up. Italian plums are especially easy to deal with because they can be eaten slightly firm or quite soft and they don’t seem to get bugs while they’re chilling there in the tree waiting for you. Their flesh doesn’t stick to their pit, so they’re a snap to slice open, cut up and dehydrate if you like. I’ll shut up now and say that the below is one of my favorite ways to use fresh plums! Be sure to use the heavy cream— this doesn’t taste as nice when you try to go low-fat. Substitute very ripe pears in autumn or (pitted) sour cherries in early summer if you hanker for the dish off-season. Double the five-spice powder if you want!

INGREDIENTS

1 tablespoon soft butter

250 milliliters heavy cream (1 cup)

110 milliliters whole milk (1/2 cup)

2 large eggs

70 grams sugar (50-60 grams if you like things less sweet)

2 tablespoons cornstarch

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

seeds of a 1-inch piece of vanilla bean

½ teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder*

350-400 grams ripe pitted Italian plums, artistically sliced in strips to an equal thinness of about ¼-½ inch

2 tablespoons brown or turbinado sugar

DIRECTIONS

Preheat the oven to 350° F and generously coat the bottom of a 9-inch glass or ceramic pie pan with the soft butter.

Whisk together the cream through five spice powder until fully combined, then pour about 2/3 cup of it into the dish. Bake 12 minutes.

Now add the sliced plums on top of the custard in a tidy, even arrangement, sprinkle on the turbinado sugar, and gently pour the rest of the custard mixture over the plums.

Bake for about 50 minutes. If that seems long to you, you can tent aluminum foil over it for the last 10 minutes. When it’s done, the custard will be puffy and pleasantly browned. It will still jiggle in the middle. Let it cool to at least “warm” level before consuming, but room temperature is best. It will be soft and yummy! To fancy the dish up, right before serving, dust lightly with powdered sugar.