Crème caramel

I remember eating the dessert called a crème caramel in Paris restaurants and cafés back in the 1970s. I'd never had anything like that before. And the places I frequented were certainly not fancy restaurants — I didn't have that kind of income. Only years later did I find out that the Mexican flan is pretty much the same thing — an egg custard cooked in a baking dish, the inside of which has been coated with a dark caramel (melted, cooked sugar).

Since I seldom go to restaurants any more, I hadn't eaten a crème caramel in years. I decided to make one. It had been decades since I'd done so, I believe. Instead of cooking it in individual ramekins, I just made the crème caramel in a soufflé dish. We can cut wedges of it and drizzle on some of the liquid caramel sauce.

This is not a hard dessert to make — if you can get the caramel to work. My first attempt was a flop. I tried to make it in the microwave, directly in the soufflé dish I wanted to cook the custard in. But the caramel re-crystallized when I tried to thin it slightly by adding some hot water. I started over and made the second caramel in a pot on the stove, and then poured it into the soufflé dish and let it cool. That worked. It hardened pretty fast so I had to swirl it around quickly to cover the bottom and sides of the soufflé dish.

To make the crème or custard, bring half a liter of milk up to the boiling point on the stovetop or in the microwave (don't let it boil over!) Add some vanilla extract (in the U.S.) or a packet of sucre vanillé (in France). In a bowl, beat three eggs with 100 grams of sugar (half a U.S. cup – 8 tablespoons) until the sugar starts to dissolve (you can put in more or less sugar to taste). Then gradually pour the hot milk over the egg-sugar mixture, stirring it constantly with a whisk. Pour the crème into the soufflé dish that has hardened caramel on the bottom and sides.

Set the soufflé dish in a pan of hot water — enough water to come halfway up the sides of the soufflé dish. This is called a bain-marie in French — a water bath. Put the pan in the oven at 180ºC (350ºF) for about 30 minutes, until the custard has set up and is no longer liquid. Test it with a skewer or the blade of a knife to judge whether it's cooked through. Then take the dish out of the bain-marie and let it cool for 30 minutes before putting it in the fridge for a couple of hours, or even overnight, covered.

Finally, when the crème caramel is completely cold, run a sharp knife around the sides of the soufflé dish to loosen the custard up. Put a shallow bowl or pie plate over the top and quickly flip the dish over. If you're lucky (and we were), the custard will fall neatly into the bowl or pie plate, and the caramel, completely liquefied, will run off the top of the custard and fill in around sides of the dish. Cut into wedges and serve cold.

Pâté de pommes de terre

Several regions in central France claim the culinary specialty called pâté de pommes de terre — le Berry, le Bourbonnais, la Sologne, le Limousin, and la Creuse, among others. The other day, I found a ready-made "potato pie" at the supermarket and let myself be tempted.

This one was made by a company in the town of Issoudun, which is 35 or 40 miles southeast of Saint-Aignan in the old Berry province. It's called Les Charcuteries Issoldunoises and it distributes products including pâtés, sausages, and cured or cooked pork to supermarkets in our region.

One thing that attracted me to this pâté de pommes de terre was the ingredient list — potatoes, crème fraîche, onions, shallots, salt, pepper, and parsley for the filling. And a pie shell made from flour, butter, water, salt, and egg yolks. That was it. No preservatives, no food colors, no chemicals.

What I didn't find on the label was cooking and serving instructions. I just assumed we could heat the potato pie up before we ate it, or we could eat it at room temperature or even cold. We heated it up in the oven at low temperature for 30 minutes or so before we cut into it and enjoyed it at lunchtime.

This would a pretty simple thing to make at home, especially if you buy ready-made pâte feuilletée (puff pastry) rather than make it yourself. Actually, it would be very good with standard pie crust (pâte brisée) too, and that's much easier and quicker to make (the late Joël Robuchon, a chef famous for potato dishes, uses pâte brisée in his recipe). Here's a segment from a Carnets de Julie show that might help you if you want to attempt it. Notice that the cook doesn't make puff pastry for his pie.

P.S. By the way, some recipes call this un pâté de pommes de terre but sometimes, as on the label pictured above, you see or hear pâté aux pommes de terre. Maybe it's a regional difference. Joël Robuchon gives a recipe for un pâté de pommes de terre solognot. Maybe if you call it a tourte, which means a pie with a top and bottom crust, it might be called une tourte aux pommes de terre. So much for un-split hairs...

The Renaudière vineyard at sunset in November

I went out into the vineyard for a late afternoon walk with Tasha yesterday afternoon, and I took my "new" old camera with me. It was a test. Reviewers say the Sony DSC-RX100 M2 camera can take good pictures in low-light situations. It was almost dark when I went out just before sunset, especially since a bank of dark clouds was moving in from the west. I'm pretty happy with the results I got — these images are much sharper than the ones my Panasonic cameras can produce, even though some of them are still pretty soft when viewed at full size on a big monitor. I processed the photos in Photoshop Elements, cropping them and adjusting sharpness, contrast, brightness, and colors.



I was lucky yesterday — it didn't start raining until I had been back in the house for a few minutes. So far, I'm pretty happy with the Sony camera. It doesn't have a very long zoom, but I already have a Panasonic camera with that feature. What the RX100 does have is a good wide-angle lens and a 1.8 F-stop setting, which is better for low light conditions. For this test, I took both close-up and wide-view shots. The slide show runs for less than two minutes.

Around the hamlet these days

Above, you can see what I meant when I said yesterday that I like the spacious an airy feel that cutting down those two apple trees has given to the back yard. There used to be two plum trees out there too, but they were uprooted in a big windstorm in 2010. That's a cherry tree behind the garden shed, and it is sickly too. It might go next year. The vegetable garden is on the right side of the photo, and there's all the firewood we got from the apple trees.

Here's a vineyard scene from Thursday afternoon. Rain was moving in from the south, but the setting sun was shining, accentuating the yellow color of the leaves on vines and trees.

I took the two photos above using a Panasonic Lumix ZS8 camera that I bought used a few years ago. The ZS8 is called the TZ18 in Europe. I found it on eBay, used, for a good price. I think a lot of people buy fancy digital cameras but almost never use them, so they're a great value second-hand.

The last three photos here are ones I took using my latest acquisition, a "new" but second-hand Sony Cyber-shot DSC-RX100M2 compact camera. When I was N.C., I thought my newest cameras had given up the ghost. It turned out that it was the battery charger that had failed. But by the time I realized what the problem was, I had done some research and let myself be tempted by the Sony camera, a 2013 model that I bought for about 220 euros on Amazon France. A new toy! (I figure it would be very easy to spend 200 euros for a meal in a nice restaurant, and I never do that.)

The bush in the photos above is a snowball bush (Viburnum) showing off its fall colors. I took both photos of it from our front terrace yesterday.

I also took the photo on the left with the new Sony camera. It was our lunch — two duck leg/thigh sections baked in the oven on a bed of white beans flavored with duck fat, thyme, bay leaf, salt and pepper. The duck legs came out of a can, and the beans came out of a jar. They are French fast food, and lunch was delicious.