Tombé du ciel: Cherry Clafoutis
The cherry custard tart that fell from the heavens.
There are times in my life when things go so surprisingly well that I find myself glancing over my shoulder in anticipation of an unexpected storm come to wash it all away. Times when everything seems to fall into place a little too well.
I’m sure it’s akin to the feeling that Deb Perelman describes in the recipe for Cherry Clafoutis on her blog, Smitten Kitchen:
“…how fearful even the most level-headed of us can be of jinxing out all the good in the world by bringing it up. I mean, really. There is a difference between flaunting or bragging about a good life and celebrating it, or at least there ought to be… And then there are the cherries. My god, we’re just swimming in them, a big bowl of cliché-come-true.”
Our lives are bursting with pleasant surprises: unexpected windfalls, new and dearer friends, the joy of watching the seasons progress every week I pick up our vegetables from the farm.
We’re expecting our first baby in September, and everything has gone eerily smooth so far. I’ve had a few of the discomforts—loose hips, the occasional sciatic zing, and near-constant Braxton Hicks contractions (I like to think of these as my uterus giving the baby a hug). This may sound like a laundry list of grievances, but I feel as if I’m making off like a bandit.
Now that I’m in the thick of the third trimester, I find myself waking up in the wee hours of each morning. This is an effect of increased cortisol (stress hormones) which prepare the body for labor and birth. I often entertain myself with a little web-surfing, and during this morning’s foray I found a photo of a sizzling cherry clafoutis that inspired me to roll out of bed and raid the larder for ingredients.
Once again, everything fell into place. I was awake and it was 5am. The recipe looked both tantalizing and simple. I had all the ingredients. Rain drizzled from a cool sky after days of heat & humidity. On a rare summer morning such as this, I could welcome the warmth of an oven.
By the time Niall woke, the clafoutis was on the table accompanied by coffee and crème fraîche. I try to rein in my expectations whenever I make a new recipe, but when I took my first bite of thick warm French custard tart all I could think was my god, it’s full of stars. Niall’s reaction wasn’t too different: what did I do to deserve this?
And that’s how I feel about my life as of late. I wanted to write that clafoutis was small-but-good thing from out of the blue, and I found that the French have a similar idiom: tombé du ciel, which means to fall from the sky. But in French it holds another connotation: a gift from the heavens, like that blessed rain that cooled the day and helped to water the fields.
