Honey-Grilled Nectarines

I only had two white nectarines left; I could have cried. They were a little starchy. It's the end of the summer, so there are really no more great white nectarines to be had until next summer. That's so long away. Months and months of cold - mind-numbing, finger-freezing, shiver-inducing Montreal cold - to get through before I can again experience a perfect white nectarine...it breaks my heart.

So I wanted these two nectarines to be used extraordinarily. To get rid of the starchiness I decided to grill them, and sweeten them, and add lemon to bring out their flavour. It worked. Rarely is cooked fruit better than raw fruit to me, but melted butter makes everything better.

Super simple:
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon water or dessert wine (I used amaretto, which was incredible...)
1 teaspoon unsalted butter
2 fresh bay leaves (optional. I skipped it because I couldn't find mine...not a good sign)
2 ripe nectarines or peaches, thickly sliced

1. In a small bowl, stir together the honey and water (or amaretto...mmm). Heat a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the butter and add the bay leaves. When the butter sizzles and the bay leaves start to blister, add the fruit.

2. Cook until the bottom is browned, about 2 minutes. Turn it over and let it brown just one minute on the other side. Transfer the fruit to plates or a platter. 

3. Reduce the heat to medium-low and pour the honey/amaretto mixture into the pan. Stir, scraping up any brown bits, and then simmer until deep brown, about 2 minutes.

4. Pour the honey mixture over the fruit. Serve with a little creme fraiche, or ice cream, or thick tangy yogurt...or just on its own. 

5. Thank someone or something for summer and cry a little inside as you savour what's left of it.

Banana Flambé With Watermelon and Dates

Okay, so this is kind of far out there, but it was one of the best things I've ever accidentally made. It didn't actually look like the picture above, but fire is a hard thing to catch in a photo.

I took a banana flambé recipe that called for rum, brown sugar and pineapple juice, but I had none of those things. Undeterred, I took stock of what I did have: watermelon (puréed I thought it might substitute for the pineapple juice), red wine (it works for poaching pears, so why not for flambéing bananas?), and dates (fresh, not dried, so they were juicy. If you used dried you'd need to soak them in water until they were soft, probably overnight).

6 fresh dates
1/4 slice (3/4" thick) of a big watermelon. Use your own judgment.
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
2 ripe bananas, quartered lengthwise, and halved crosswise, or made into whatever size pieces you want. If the bananas are under-ripe the recipe won't work since they'll be too starchy. Over-ripe is fine too as long as they're not falling apart from being too mushy.
splash of red wine
Long matches or a BBQ lighter...wish I had those things

Basically, you want to purée the watermelon, dates, and spices so you get a fairly liquid consistency, as if you were using brown sugar and pineapple juice. Pour the purée into a skillet (if you have to scrape it in and it doesn't want to come out of the blender it's too dry and you should add more watermelon first) and turn the heat to medium-high. When the mixture comes to a boil add the bananas. Cook, turning gently for 3 minutes (you just want the bananas to heat up).

Pour over a splash of wine (about 2-3 tbsp, but more or less is not a big deal, as long as you don't mind the wine taste). When the mixture starts to boil again (a few seconds later), light a long match or use a BBQ lighter to light the alcohol on fire. If it doesn't work, try again. After 2 tries, if it doesn't work, give up. Bonnie Stern says to "not worry. It will still taste great". Comforting, Bonnie. All my other flambés have worked but this one wouldn't. It may have been the fact that I tried to use a regular lighter and charred my thumb. It didn't burn, but there was a nice bit of black involved.

When it does light there'll be a big "WHOOSH" of flame, so make sure your head isn't too close to the pan. I think it works better with liquor, like rum, because of the higher alcohol content. Ah well. It still tasted great, like Bonnie assured me it would. Actually, with a little thick yogurt as a bed for the warm, sweet sauce (you have no idea how amazing dates are until you use them to substitute for other sweet things), and perfect bananas, this was heaven. I hate fruit desserts, but this was smooth and rich and filling. If only flames liked being caught on camera. You'll have to make the recipe to see the magic for yourself.

Oh, this works perfectly if you're having friends over because it's so simple, cheap and makes you look very gourmet. Plus, if you're a guy, you get to show off your skills with fire. I think flambé came somewhere in the evolution of "cooking with fire" after the open pit with animal on a stick, after the tandoor oven, and before the Foreman Grill. How far we've fallen...

Oh (again)! In Quebec you can buy pig-roasting setups for fires! RONA and big home stores carry them. Sure, you can roast lamb, but you know it's traditional Quebecois families who are buying these things for big pig roasts in the country. Seriously, they sell out. Call ahead.

Reflections on Synchronized Swimming: Not So Kid-Friendly Citrus Jelly

The only differences between the kid-friendly jelly I made and this not-so-kid-friendly jelly are you need a whole lot more patience for this one, and the recipe is unnecessarily complicated, but you get whole chunks of fruit that pop in your mouth, which is very cool...and un-grown-up-like. It also looks cooler. See how my choice of vocabulary reflects my preference for childish things in this instance.

Really, the length of time it takes to make this recipe is a draw-back, but the result is delicious and unique. Make sure you measure the fruit as you go or you may end up dissecting the right number of fruit but still end up with way too much of it, which may or may be a waste of your life. I think the funny part of this recipe is that it comes just BEFORE the kid-friendly jelly recipe in di Stasio's cookbook, as if once you've made this recipe you'll never want to do it again and the kid version will look mighty appealing when you turn the page. Like a brain massage after a math test.

Ingredients
7-8 regular sized navel or blood oranges, 4-5 massive ones
3-4 normal pink grapefruit, 2 meal-sized grapefruit (the ones that are bigger than a softball)
3 tbsp sugar, 4 if you use the huge fruit, 5 if they're not that sweet (or honey or agave)
2 tbsp gelatin (two packets)

So this looks easy. 4 ingredients! It's only easy if you're a good pith-remover. Not to be confused with being a good "pither"...lets keep this jelly as friendly as possible...Maybe you should use agar-agar instead of gelatin? Jelly is far from animal-friendly or vegan...

Cut the top and bottom off all the fruit, then remove as much of the skin and white membrane as possible, working your way from top to bottom all around each fruit. It's better to remove too much than too little. You'll save yourself a lot of time later when the rest of the membranes just fall off instead of sticking stubbornly to the fruit.

Then take a sharp knife and cut into the fruit on both sides of the white membrane that separates the fruit into segments. Cut very, very close to the membrane so you don't waste too much fruit. This whole process is very wasteful, and I generally eat the membrane as I go or once it's accumulated, since it's so sad to see all the delicious fruit go to waste for a silly presentation. But that's often how cooking goes, sadly. After you've cut in to the core all the way around the fruit segments should start falling out of their own accord. You can encourage this by gently opening the fruit and removing the segments with your hands. You will probably need to use your sharp knife to help it along, or scrape some of the little exploding capsules of juice that got left behind if your knife skills are, like mine, less than spectacular. 2 1/2 hours later I had successfully segmented 12 enormous pieces of fruit. Unfortunately, then I read the instruction that you only need 4 cups of the segments. I had 8. Double recipe time!

Anyway, do all this pith-removing over a sieve to catch the juices. I briefly considered taking some of my hard-won segments and puréeing them and then sieving them to turn them into juice, since you need 1 1/2 cups of the juice, but I couldn't do it. It would be such a waste of all my pith-removing. So I added some lychee juice to the cup of juices that had dripped through the sieve while I had worked, to give me the required cup and a half.

Then you dissolve the honey or sugar in this juice. Just stir it in. It doesn't really have to dissolve since hot liquid will be added shortly and do all your dissolving work for you.

Take a small saucepan and add 1/4 cup of the juice (1/2 cup for a double recipe, and a wider saucepan). Then sprinkle the gelatin over top. I messed this up. Stupid non-kid-friendly jelly...My saucepan wasn't very wide and the gelatin had to sit on top of itself instead of "blooming" properly on the juice. What the heck does that mean? It gelatinizes. There are no buds of flowers involved. No intoxicating smell of Spring. What a scam, I thought, as I stood in my chilly kitchen, dreaming of daffodils.

Five minutes into this supposed blooming process you turn the stove burner to low and let the gelatin melt. This took forever. The gelatin really didn't want to melt, so I turned the heat up a bit. It shouldn't have made a difference. I remember my synchronized swimming days when you take a kettle of boiling water and you dissolve knox gelatin in a small bowl. Then you take a paintbrush and paint your hair with it so it stays in place in a very tight bun. Just pray the person assisting you is good with a paintbrush, because dripping boiling gelatin is not a good thing to have land on your ears and shoulders.

So why can't you just bring the fruit juice here to a boil and then pour it over the gelatin? After the gelatin melts in the recipe you add the rest of the fruit juice, which cools down the liquid and makes your metaphorical "bun" of dessert into a gloopy, chunky, unappetizing thing. You've got to somehow then pour it over the fruit. Well, that wasn't going to work, so I had to reheat the gelatin. I don't exactly fully understand the properties of gelatin, but I figured it probably shouldn't be reheated. In swimming when the gelatin solidified before it could be painted onto your head you just added more boiling water and stirred. Problem solved. So I reheated the gelatin on the stove. Not the same as pouring more hot liquid over it (next time I would soften it over low heat like the recipe said but then I would boil the remaining juice so that when it got added to the gelatin it would dissolve it instead of solidifying it), but not horrible. The mixture got poured over the fruit and the two big bowls of dessert got stuck in the fridge to become jelly. Unfortunately, they started turning white around the edges of the fruit, the same way gelatin-painted hair got white and gross when it had been sitting at room temperature too long. No one cared, especially me, since it tasted great, but it certainly was not as pretty as the port glasses of jelly in the picture in the recipe book. Obviously, this recipe would have been very different if di Stasio had been a synchronized swimmer...