Rocky Mountain Randoms - The Clafoutis Triumphant Edition

Victory, my friends. Victory at last.

We've been trying to put a rhubarb clafoutis* on the menu for a couple months now, with experiment results ranging from disastrous to frustrating.

(*Clafoutis, kluh-FOO-tee, is kind of a rustic mating of a baked custard fruit tart and a souffle. They're delicious just out of the oven, with a tender, puffy custard and tons of fruit, usually cherries, served in a ramekin or a tart shell.)

Lumpy and I must have made a dozen batches over the past several weeks, trying Chef's recipe, my recipe, baking at higher temps, baking at lower temps, with a water bath, without one, letting the batter sit, using it right away.

Every time, the batter either souffled magnificently and then collapsed like a Giuliani bid for the Oval Office or simply sank into itself and became a hard, eggy disc of disgustingness.

Argh.

Damn altitude.

Finally, Witless of all people brought in a clafoutis recipe from one of her books that intrigued me immediately. There were no ground almonds as in several of the other recipes, and the proportion of flour to liquid was higher. It also called for kirschwasser, and I feel any recipe demanding the inclusion of alcohol is worth trying.

So, earlier this week, I sauteed some rhubarb, par-baked some pate sablee shells (pate sablee, or "sandy dough," is flaky but sturdy, something between a pie crust and a shell made of cookie dough... I like using it for tarts because it can take a lot of abuse and still taste elegant), whisked together the batter, at the last minute decided to add an extra egg, poured it in and held my breath...

And it worked.

Holy crap, it worked! The clafoutis didn't souffle up quite as much as at sea level, but after baking they didn't sink, either, and they had none of the nasty texture or taste of raw flour that the others had. When der ErlkonigRedux asked for the recipe, I knew I'd achieved the unachievable. Whoo hoo!

I actually took a victory lap around the kitchen, but subtly enough that I don't think anyone noticed.

Today I reheated one of them to see how the texture/taste might suffer, dusted it with confectioner's sugar and paired it with a walnut brown butter ice cream I'd made earlier in the day. Chef liked it enough that it's going on the menu next week, which both thrills me and fills me with terror... what if it was a fluke? What if the planets were in alignment just for that one batch? What if I go to bake off more next week only to have them turn into inedible hockey pucks of chewy egg matter??

St. Honore, watch over my clafoutis and keep them safe from the thin air...

In other news:

- I rode my bike to work for the second time this week yesterday. The ride to the ranch wasn't too horrible, though I still think of it as my own personal Bataan Death March, only on wheels. The ride heading home started out actually kind of positively. I made it up a big hill without having to stop and walk, and I felt pretty good about it. Then I turned onto the main highway that runs along an area of the valley called "the flats." Flat, paved highway good, right? Au contraire. I was cycling into a ridiculous headwind the entire time. I mean, crazy wind. It took me almost twice as long to bike the three miles of flats as it did to cover the three miles of hilly gravel and dirt road. Grr. I have a bruise on the bottom of one foot from slamming the pedal down so hard in an attempt to move forward against the wind.

Why do I do it? Because I hate it so much, I guess. Like Darcy says in that classic scene from the BBC adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice": I will conquer this.

Whether it's clafoutis or finding a way to cycle without wanting to run myself over and end it all, yeah, I will conquer this.

- Some of you have expressed concern that I appear to hate living in Colorado, so I just want to clarify: there are a lot of things I really like about it here, and on the scale of places I've lived, Ski Podunk ranks higher than anywhere I've lived in New Jersey, higher than Warwick (NY), Virginia or Las Vegas. It goes without saying that it's way higher on the list than 'scow, though if I could separate Russia's rich archeological landscape from, you know, the actual Russians, it might get higher than Vegas on my list.

But I digress.

I'd say this place is tied with Madison (WI), though it falls short of Munich, Rhinebeck (NY), Milwaukee or New York City.

I am a lot happier now that I'm in a two-bedroom apartment with views of the Divide from my bedroom window, with all my stuff out of storage (and all over the new place as I've yet to organize it). It's nice getting direct sunlight and not having to listen to the boilers bump and grind all night (my studio apartment that I just vacated faced north, under a heavy overhang, and was above the boiler room so it was always dark and hot and noisy... come to think of it, it was like living in a submarine.) Wiley seems a lot happier, too, and we both enjoy finding new places to go walkies.

The hiking opportunities and the scenery here really are amazing, and I've already gone on at length about the wildlife sightings and cool geological formations.

(Best wildlife sighting so far happened while my laptop was dead... it happened on my birthday, actually, when Chef came over to me working at my station and said, in typical deadpan style, "there's a bear outside." I expected to see a tiny black speck on the other side of the meadow, like when people got all excited about a moose a couple weeks ago. Instead, I went outside and sure enough there was a black bear, an enormous black bear, loping around our driveway between the restaurant entrance and the dumpster. The maintenance guys were in pickups and golf carts trying to shoo it away. Eventually it barrelled off into the woods and sat behind a tree, scratching its ear and looking annoyed at the crowd of us standing there watching it.)

That said, the cost of living here is higher than I'd figured, especially for stuff like fresh produce. And as I've posted before, I'm whelmed by Coloradans' manners. Take my neighbors. I live in a four-plex apartment, with all guys in the other units. All four of them (two live alone, the guy above me has a roommate) watched me move in, carrying boxes for hours at a time over a week-long period (one of the supernice, superstrong maintenance guys at work moved my furniture for me, God love him... including my seven-foot-tall Ikea bookcases, which he carried single-handedly!).

Not one of my neighbors offered to help, or even said hello. One closed the door in my face as I labored with a heavy box (damn National Geographic collection!). Another actually stood hiding behind his truck (I saw his shadow behind me) trying to avoid making eye contact lest I ask for help. I mean, I wouldn't ask for help, but Jesus, is the thought of being neighborly so frickin' odious that a grown man needs to hide behind his truck??

My neighbors upstairs take the cake, though. One guy is very slick and chatty and never home. I've gathered that the lease is in his name (the landlord seems to think only one guy lives there... one guy with a Samoyed, which is what he told him). In any case, Mr. Absentia has not one Samoyed but rather two Great Pyrenese puppies around a year old. Mr. Absentia was away when I moved in, "visiting his ex-wife in Washington" according to his roommate, whom I'll call Glub because it suits him. Glub does not appear to groom, or even wash regularly, and moves at a rate that would make a snail roll its eyes. It appears to me that car salesman-y Mr. Absentia found Glub drinking in a bar or downing Chalupas at the nearby Taco Bell Express and said "hey man! let's be roomies!" and then saddled Glub with perpetual dog-sitting. (Mr. Absentia, for the record, is currently in Hawaii for two weeks, or so he told me before disappearing again.)

Glub, it would seem, not only doesn't like dogs, but doesn't know what to do with them. When I moved in, he was keeping the dogs out all day on the balcony, without shelter. Dogs being dogs, especially puppies, they pooped and peed when they felt like it. And all their poopage and peeage dripped down onto my deck, directly below. Not only did it stink to high heaven, but before I realized what was happening, some of my boxes and my bike pump got dumped on. Ugh.

Nothing was ruined, but as someone who tries to be a responsible dog owner, I got really wrapped around the axle. I went upstairs and yelled at Glub, who was apologetic but also seemed genuinely surprised that the dogs would poop and pee if left out all day.

Then Glub tried leaving the dogs in the poorly fenced yard behind our building all day. Several times I or another neighbor wound up running around trying to wrangle the dogs back after they jumped the fence or simply pushed through one of the gaping holes in it.

Again, Glub seemed shocked, shocked I tell you, that the dogs had gotten loose. Repeatedly. Several days in a row.

Glub has been keeping the dogs inside since then, but three times this week, now that Mr. Absentia is away again, when I got home and opened the hallway door, it stank so badly of poop and pee that I nearly passed out. I know it's not Wiley, so I think Glub is now letting the dogs do their business in the hall or something. Or maybe he's the one peeing and pooping. From the look of him, I wouldn't be surprised.

It's too bad, because they're nice dogs and I like them, even though their main leisure activity seems to be rolling a bowling ball around over my head and barking, for hours on end, when Glub goes wherever he goes at night for a cold one and a Chalupa.

Then there's Keith, my next-door neighbor, a portly trucker in his 50s who swaggered his way over John Wayne-style my third day here and announced "You better clean up after your dog. I've already had a few go-rounds dealing with them," waving his hand in the general direction of Glub and Mr. Absentia's unit.

I said "Yeah? Well, you haven't dealt with me yet. Hi, my name is [Pirate]. Nice to meet you, neighbor. And, by the way, what did you say your name was?"

He got all defensive and puffy in the way bullies get when someone slaps them upside the head and tells them "hey, you're kind of a jackass."

Anyway, rambling though they are, I think the above anecdotes illustrate why I'm not charmed by the locals. Some are nice - the librarian, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, was friendly and offered to help me fix my computer, and the chick who finally did fix it was also nice. But by and large, I'd say New Yorkers are a friendlier, more considerate bunch.

Yeah, that's right. Noo f'n Yawkers.

I like most of the people at work, but we don't share many interests beyond the kitchen. That's why your emails and blog comments and postcards and boxes o' booty have meant even more than usual. So thanks.

- A big plus of living here, and a big fascination for me, has been the hummingbirds. I've never lived anywhere where there were so many. I put up a hummingbird feeder on my now pee-free deck in hopes of luring them the way they're lured to the feeders all around the ranch. The first couple days, I got nothin'. Then I had one of the big red ones come and stick his beak on one of the feeding holes and dash away as if I'd put rat poison in there, leading me to run out onto my deck and shout after him "come on! It's organic simple syrup fer crissakes! That's not good enough for you?!"

For a while I had a complex that the 25% organic sugar, 75% water mix I'd made based on what I'd read was wrong, that they didn't like the taste or that it wasn't red like the commercial syrups you can buy to fill your feeder. Over the past week, however, I've been getting several repeat customers at dawn and again at twilight. They buzz past and around like tiny Apache 'copters, fighting each other for the syrup. Hey, it's organic, little birdie. Tell your friends.