Carrot rice soup and apple clafoutis

Dinner last night was a bowl of delicious carrot rice soup and a slice of warm apple clafoutis. I am a huge fan of soup, and I can't stop baking with apples these days, so this was the perfect combination to keep me busy before dinner.

I saw the carrot rice soup on Everybody Likes Sandwiches and thought it looked really easy and really good. I didn't have dried chilis or marjoram in the house, so I substituted a teaspoon of herbs de provence instead. The recipe mentions that the soup can be made with either pre-cooked rice (white or brown) or dry rice cooked directly in the soup. I chose to make a batch of brown rice ahead of time and stir it into the pureed soup. This is a wonderfully deep-flavored soup that's perfect for chilly fall days. The only thing missing in mine was salt. I thought that my homemade chicken stock (from my pot pie expedition) would impart enough saltiness, but no. I simply added a pinch or two of ground sea salt after the fact, and that worked fine.

Sometimes when I make soup I like something sort of fun to go with it. That's where the clafoutis came in. I had apples and while I'd only made clafoutis before with plums or cherries, I googled apple clafoutis and discovered the most amazing recipe courtesy of Michael Chiarello (my photo doesn't come close to doing this dessert justice). Ever seen Michael on the Food Network? He has to be one of the nicest cooking souls around. I did not adapt the recipe in any way except that I used 2% instead of whole milk, because that's all I had in the fridge. It didn't seem to negatively affect the baked clafoutis in any way. We had a near-empty container of Greek yogurt in the fridge, so I added a dollop of that to my piece and some creme fraiche to the boys' pieces. Alan couldn't stop raving about it but then he's a fan of virtually anything if it's origins are French.