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.

100% Successful Pouding Chomeur

I love pudding cakes. You take all the wonderful things about cake, heat it up and let the icing soak through the cake, giving a higher icing:cake ratio. You can't mess up the consistency of the icing since it's liquid, but it can turn into a gooey, caramel-y sauce when all you did was add boiling, sweetened water.

Once when I wrote about pouding au chomeur on Midnight Poutine, a reader posted a comment:

"It's pudding chômeur, not AU chômeur... that would mean it's pudding made out of people on EI instead of for people on EI...
cheers!"

I promptly responded that I would stop eating people. My point in that article was that I once fell in love with the pouding chomeur at Soupesoup, a restaurant in Montreal. Unfortunately, it's very much not dairy-free, and it's also made with maple syrup, two things I digest well. Since then I've tried (generally unsuccessfully) to create a dairy-free version without refined sugar. Last time was a disaster. This time was very good, but was certainly not a traditional pouding chomeur. What is a traditional pouding chomeur, you ask? There's actually a really interesting history to the dish. It's tricky to figure out if it was originally made with maple syrup or brown sugar, since the recipe originates in the depression when basic ingredients like butter, milk and eggs were expensive. I can't quite figure out if the pouding was originally made with maple syrup or brown sugar, though, and I also don't think most of the recipes out there are of what used to be made to save money, since they include all of these expensive ingredients.

In theory it would have actually been less expensive to make maple syrup in Quebec than buy brown sugar for the sauce, but I know that other provinces as diverse as Saskatchewan, Ontario and Newfoundland all have pudding cake recipes from this era that call for sugar, and they would have wanted to save just as much money as Quebecers, AND the Saskatchewanians and Newfoundlanders didn't have a whole lot of maple trees to tap. So brown sugar must have still been relatively affordable.

Then there's the margarine/butter issue. Margarine was developed as a less expensive alternative to butter, so traditionally this recipe would be made with margarine, but it's interesting that now-a-days recipes usually just call for butter or some even call for butter in the sauce and margarine in the cake. I think the latter recipes are the most interesting because it potentially shows that Quebec bakers knew that the flavour of butter simply couldn't be replaced by margarine, so they used it in the sauce where its flavour would shine, and settled for margarine in the cake batter would it wouldn't matter as much.

Finally, eggs. You can make this recipe very easily without egg but most recipes have one egg in the batter. Yes it makes it lighter and fluffier, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be traditionally used since you don't really need it.

This recipe is an example of KNOWING something but completely ignoring it. Like you know you should get the single scoop of ice cream but you get the triple instead, or you know you should vacuum, but, well...

I'm clearly aware of how the recipe is SUPPOSED to be made, but like the bakers that changed the traditional recipe back from margarine to butter and from no egg to yes egg, I choose to update:


Ingredients
1 cup all-purpose flour (I used gluten-free flour which gave an interesting grainy texture that I liked, but for fluffy pillows, go with white flour or cake flour)
1/2 cup cane sugar (this probably also made it grainy. You can use refined white sugar and all that lifestyle choice means is you'll get diabetes a few years earlier. Cane sugar is not a superstar, either. You can stick it in the food processor to makes the granules smaller if you want. It might work)
4 tsp  baking powder (I'm CONVINCED this is traditional since there's no egg and this is what will help the cake rise)
1/4 tsp nutmeg
3/4 cup milk (I used almond. You can use soy or regular milk. Rice will be a bit gross I think)
1/4 cup butter, melted (very non-traditionally I used Earth Balance. You can also use margarine to be unhealthily traditional)
1 tsp lemon rind, finely grated (this kind of makes it into a Greek honey cake when combined with the honey syrup below)

Sauce:
1 1/2 cups warm water (you don't even need to boil it since you're using honey not granulated sugar)
1 cup honey (the original recipe was for maple syrup, but that makes me anxious, literally, so I turned this into a Greek-style dessert. I figured that was kosher because of the lemon zest in the cake. Very non-traditional, but very flavourful, especially since I didn't have a real butter flavour to save the cake from just being a plain, relatively bland, overly sweetened pudding cake)
1 tsp cornstarch
2 tbsp butter (optional. This is for those days when the chomeur can afford a bit of extra butter luxury. I skipped it because the honey was already so flavourful. I'm sure it would have been better with it, though)

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F
1. In bowl, mix together flour, sugar, baking powder and nutmeg.

2. In another bowl, whisk together milk, melted butter and lemon rind. Pour milk mixture over flour mixture. Stir until just combined. The more you stir, the less air will be in the cake and the denser it will become. Spread in a greased 8-inch (2 L) square glass baking dish. NOTE: Use one with high sides! The liquid in this bubbles and easily overflows so if you don't have a high-sided baking dish make sure you put a rimmed cookie sheet under your dish to catch the overflow. It's a waste of brown sugar syrup though. You'll be sad when it burns to the cookie sheet, you'll be sadder when it sets off the fire alarm, but you'll be happy that you didn't have to scrape hardened caramel off the bottom of your oven with a metal spatula.

3. For the sauce: In bowl, whisk together water, honey, butter and cornstarch. Pour the liquid over the batter.  Put the dish in the oven until golden and firm to the touch, 40 to 45 minutes. This is absolutely perfect servect with a rich, dense vanilla ice cream. Density is key because the cake is so moist and tender. If you have low-fat or airy fluff it'll just dissolve into a waste of nothing in your mouth.

4. Be glad you live in the 2nd depression when about 20 kinds of butter are still abundantly available, and curse your Eastern European lactose-intolerant heritage. Also curse bland, disappointing soy margarines...(optional)