Plums galore!

There is so much lovely summer fruit to choose from these days. The other day I bought several pounds of plums and thought I should use them up before they got too soft. So I made this easy peasy plum tart from the Contessa herself. Her recipe called for a lot of plums, and I found I didn't have enough to get a tightly packed tart, so I added some apricots I had on hand.


Then I got my hands on some Italian prune plums, which the Contessa's recipe had called for, and I thought I should take a shot at clafouti.


Clafouti had always seemed something mysterious and unattainable for some reason. And then I read about it again recently at the LA TImes food blog. And after reading that plums are often used in clafouti, second only to cherries, I was sold. The Italian prune plums are really juicy and the flesh is a delicate green color, they reminded me of damsons that I had long long ago. IN fact they were so tasty, that by the time I got to making it the next day, I found my husband had scarfed down a pound or more. So I had to supplement the scarce fruit with strawberries.


I used this recipe from Orangette for the clafouti. It was really good, but I couldn't get my fussy 4-year-old to try any.