Some days just seem to start and finish with cooking and today was one of those days.
It started for me at around 8:30 peeling and dicing the papaya and pineapple than have been ripening in the garage fridge for the last two weeks into a tropical fruit salad with a squeeze of juice of two limes.
We then ate bowls of yogurt, granola, and fruit salad for breakfast.
I then rode my bike to the farmer’s market and bought a loaf of Cloud Cliff wholewheat bread for $6.00.
Suzette started clearing out the garage of wicker patio furniture she had bought at the estate sale by us moving it to the back porch while I made ratatouille by intermittently moving furniture from the garage to our back patio while also chopping a large onion, two heads of garlic, a large green bell pepper, two zucchini, two yellow squash, and an eggplant and sautéing those ingredients in a large ale Creuset casserole with about 1 ½ T. of Spanish olive oil as I watched Texas lose a heart breaker to OSU 10 to 13 in overtime. When the game ended a bit before 2:00 I ate a peanut butter and honey sandwich and took a sugar tablet and we rode against an about ten mph breeze to Campbell Rd. and back.
After we returned I took a shower while Suzette started cooking the two racks of St. Louis ribs I had bought last week for $1.99/lb. by placing them on a rack over water in a roaster in the oven at 350 degrees for twenty minutes and then I reduced the temperature to 250 degrees and we baked them for an additional four hours, basting them twice with Masterpiece BBQ sauce.
While the ribs were cooking Suzette worked with Mario and his girl friend to clean the old garden, the garage, the shed, and the compose pile and I diced three vine ripened tomatoes I bought at Sprouts for $.99/lb. and picked a large handful of each of basil and oregano and de-stemmed and chopped the leaves and added those three ingredients to the simmering ratatouille while I watched Oklahoma come from behind to beat Kansas State in Manhattan, Kansas.
Then at 5:00 after Suzette finished working in the yard and took a shower and the found a recipe for Poached Quince and Tart Tatin, and I began coring, peeling and quartering eight large Quince she brought from the orchard at the Center for a Ageless Living.
Poached Quince
Suzette Poached the diced pieces of four Quince in sugar water with dried golden and black raisins and cranberries and cinnamon and vanilla in a deep French copper clad cooking pot.
Tart Tatin
While the quinces were poaching and the ratatouille was simmering, Suzette called Willy and asked him to bring six apples for the Tart Tatin when he came for dinner at 6:30.
Mexican Black Beans
Suzette heated the contents of a 24 oz. can of whole black beans in a large skillet and sautéed them
with ½ of a diced onion, an avocado leaf and about 1 T. of dried leaves of hoja Santa and salt.
She then made a pastry dough for the Tart Tatin and put it into the fridge to chill.
When Willy came we fetched Fat Tire New Belgium beers from the garage fridge and I separated the ribs on one rack and we plated our plates with ribs, black beans, and ratatouille and watched TCU and Kansas playing football. It soon became evident that TCU was dominant when it scored 43 points in the first half and Kansas never advanced the ball into TCU territory.
Then Suzette fetched a 2 inch deep copper baking dish from Mother’s French copper clad cooking ware and we cored, peeled, and quartered four or five of the apples and a Suzette sliced the quartered Quince into thinner slices until there were enough slices of each to fill the cooking dish. She then tossed the fruit in sugar and then cooked it on the top of the stove with sugar and butter until a caramel sauce formed in the bottom of the dish. She then rolled out the pastry into a sheet and laid it on the top of the fruit and tucked in the sides and baked the Tart.
I showed a Suzette Julia Child’s recipe for Tart Tatin on page 638 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking vol. 1, but she preferred the recipes she found on the internet. I felt rather out of date.
We sampled the poached Quince with yogurt and later, when the Tart Tatin had baked in the oven, we flipped the Tart onto a ceramic platter, rearranged the fruit into its original position and spread a bit of the caramel sauce that was left in the baking dish onto the fruit, we made mint tea and sampled the
Tart Tatin.
The caramelized fruit layer
The Tart Tatin was wonderful; a complete dessert dish made from the combination of very simple ingredients, fresh Quince and apples, a dough, and sugar and butter to make a caramel sauce.
The same can be said for the ratatouille; a vegetable stew made from simple, readily available ingredients that when combined without anything additional, creates a completely unique dish.
I felt like today was French Cooking 101 with an American classic and a Mexican classic tossed in.
Bon Appetit
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