A “clafouti” is an odd sort of thing to describe. It’s kind of a fruit custard, only not really. It sort of has the texture of pastry, but not quite.
Truthfully, you’ll just have to try it for yourself. What I know for sure is that this one is delicious!
I still had some of the blend of cooking apples left that I’d purchased at Cloud Mountain Farm’s Fall Fruit Festival, and I hadn’t tried baking a clafouti before, so it seemed like a perfect time to try. Despite it’s fancy French name, it’s quick and easy to prepare. Continue Reading
My mother and my grandmother come to mind when I think of baking powder biscuits. Both knew how to make them light and flaky, a perfect complement to almost any meat and vegetable meal. 
We associate cherry blossoms with early spring, but what says early summer better than the cherries themselves? Cherries and berries are the earliest fruits of the year in this area, and their fresh sweet flavor is such a treat after a long locavore winter of root vegetables and food from the freezer. 
Kale is easy to grow in our climate, and can grow year round except in the most extreme cold winters. The taste of the leaves becomes sweeter as the winter progresses, making it a wonderful cold weather vegetable when little else is being harvested locally. There’s even a variety of kale called “Hungry Gap,” a British term for the time between summer growing seasons. 
Garlic scapes are the curly, peculiar-looking thickened parts in the middle of the garlic stem where the flower and seed head eventually forms. Farmers raising garlic usually trim off the scapes before they fully form. Instead of putting energy into flowering, it encourages the plants to use the energy to form larger bulbs at the base of the stem. 
The savory flavor of herbed yogurt cheese (a good alternative to non-local cream cheese) makes a nice change from the usual sweet and sugary form of French toast. The eggs in the toast blend well with tangy cheese and herb flavors. The result is a hearty dish suitable for any meal of the day.
Last week’s menu
One difference between regular American eating and locavore eating is the seasonality of ingredients. Some ingredients are only available fresh during a couple of months of the year.
A cheese soufflé is a classic dish, and I wanted to see if it could be adapted easily to locally available ingredients. This recipe is a variation based on 
It’s hard to find locally grown fruit in the grocery stores in winter. I love my freezer at this time of the year. I was rummaging in the fruit section of my freezer and found a bag of beautiful frozen raspberries from last summer’s harvest in my friend Nancy’s garden. I froze them spread in a single layer on a cookie sheet and then put them in a plastic freezer bag. That way the berries don’t stick together. After months in the freezer, the color was still so beautiful and the flavor was so sweet that I didn’t add any sweetener to this recipe. You could add a tablespoon or two of local honey if your berries are more tart. 
I’d encourage you to experiment with this recipe, which combines two traditional elements of an American breakfast–eggs and hashbrowns. In this version, the potato “nests” are made with raw grated potatoes which are first parboiled, pressed into muffin tins, and then baked. One variation would be to pile the parboiled potatoes on a cookie sheet and use a spoon to make depressions for the eggs before baking the nests. Another possible variation would be to use mashed potatoes instead of grated.
