The Dinner Files

My son’s class had a harvest festival yesterday right after the Halloween parade.* I was asked to bring a foodstuff, a dish, a treat, if you will, that both represented the fall harvest and fit the school district’s new food and snack policy which is at once draconian in its ban of cupcakes and probably a good idea based on how many Safeway cupcakes I saw make their way through the school’s door last year.

You know I wasn’t going to bring Safeway cupcakes anyway. I did run through the gamut of fall produce-laden baked goods: pumpkin bread, carrot “muffins” (really just unfrosted carrot cupcakes), squash rolls. persimmon pudding…. And then realized that all the other parents would take that sweeter, more delicious road, and decided to make something in which the fall harvest item was still somewhat obvious instead of mashed up, sweetened, and hidden.

So I seeded and peeled and chopped a fairly large butternut squash (it weighed in at about 3 pounds), tossed it in a mix of 2 tablespoons each soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, and brown sugar thinned with 3 tablespoons water. These were then spread on a baking sheet, covered, and baked at 375 for almost 30 minutes; then uncovered and roasted until things got very tender and just a bit glazed, which took another 30 minutes. I transferred them to a platter to bring to the school and drizzled the bits of glaze-y stuff from the pan over the top.

The teachers really liked it.

I’m thinking any winter squash you can peel would work, and sake or white wine could stand in for the vinegar just fine, too. This squash – just a bit sweet but full of fiber and antioxidants and all goods things – would make a good, nutritious base – along with some (brown) rice and stir-fried tofu or chicken or something – before heading out into the night to indulge.

Note: As often is the case, a recipe-style recipe is over at Local Foods.

* The parade was pretty awesome. All the kids were in a circle around the playground and each class took a turn parading around the inside of the giant circle while music played and the principal – dressed as the school mascot, in a full-on monkey suit – danced his pants off (no, not literally!)  in the middle. The kids’ costumes were fun to see, and I was impressed by the sheer number of ninjas who showed up, but the best part was watching the principal really work that monkey costume.

I love a good French onion soup filled with slithery sliced of deeply caramelized onions and flavorful broth sharpened up by a splash of white wine and soup-sodded toasts of baguette and plenty of aged gruyere melted on top.

I am alone in this love, at least at my house. The soup will get eaten, but no one else will be terribly excited about it. But a crisp chill has hit the air here in San Francisco, and warming soup was what I craved.

Working on the age-old combination of apples and onions (and the contents of our larder), I switched up the al-kee-hol in this soup – using hard apple cider instead of white wine – and was charmed by the sweet note it added. The rest of the household was thrilled. We also had little whole grain toasts topped with a cheese that is a lot like Camembert (the name was thrown out with the wrapper but it was sitting the fridge whereas gruyere was not) floating on the soup, which was a lovely combination (any soft, bloomy-rind cheese would be yummy). Next time I would take it one step further and use rye bread for the toasts – the sweetness of the soup can handle that extra flavor.

Note: Be sure to use a very dry apple cider. Some pear ciders are even drier and would work great too. This soup has a sweetness to it even with a bone-dry cider.

Cider onion soup

Peel and thinly slice 2 1/2 pounds onions. Melt 6 tablespoons of butter in a medium or large heavy soup pot over medium-high heat. Add onions and 1/2 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring, until onions soften up. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook, stirring when you think of it and adjusting heat so onions are cooking but not at all browning, until onions caramelize and turn all deeply amber from the inside and taste almost like candy they’re so sweet. Be patient, this process takes awhile – at least 40 minutes and up to an hour. Add 1 cup hard apple cider and bring to a boil. Add about 3 cups vegetable or chicken stock (I’m guessing plain water would work fine too) and bring to a boil. Add a couple sprigs of fresh thyme, if you’re so inclined, reduce heat, and simmer soup for 10 to 15 minutes. Taste and add more salt if you must.

Toast slices of whole wheat, rye, or other whole grain bread, then top those toasts with slices of bloomy-rind cheese like Brie or Camembert. You can float these as-is in the soup (the heat from the toast and the soup will gently melt the cheese) or broil these toasts to give the cheese a head-start. Some people will want freshly ground black pepper in their soup; some people will not. I found the sweet, peppery, cheesy combination divine.

Please excuse my absence lately. It was quite a week last week and I’m still recovering. Between house guests and a big family to-do and the school carnival, I hardly know which way is up. On Sunday the house guests and the family to-do and the school carnival all came together in a whirling, swirling, perfectly sunny day of sno-cones, lollipops, and cake walks.

There were many Watsons on hand to help populate and energize the school carnival, and I will be forever grateful to my cousin and uncle who pitched in to help run the Lollipop Game. It’s been two days and my barking slogans are still running through my head: one ticket gets you two tries, everyone’s a winner at the lollipop game, worst case scenario is you end up with two lollipops, the lollipop game- where everyone’s a winner, there’s no skill involved – anyone can play the lollipop game. The thing about the Lollipop Game is you get to see which kids will become gamblers. Some kids pay their ticket, pick their lollipops and, if they get a dot on the bottom of one, happily pick another lollipop and then move on to another “game.” But the Lollipop Game really gets under some kids skins. They come back again and again, trying to game the board, hoping to decipher where the precious dotted lollipops are, working to figure out my strategy in arranging the board. (For the record, my strategy was complete and total randomness. I had a mix of dotted and plain lollipops and would mix them together and stick them in the board.) We started out with one lollipop out of five having a dot, but it was so fun when the kids got a dotted lollipop that my cousin started moving the ratio towards the 1 to 3 area, so kids were walking away with six or seven lollipops at a time.

My own family did very well at the Cake Walk. The very first winner was my Aunt Nancy. The second winner? Ernest. That’s the cake he chose above. The parents who bring the cakes know that the kids cannot resist a candy-laden cake and decorate accordingly. I called the parents who made this one out on their use of old Valentine’s Day candy – I was super impressed at the chutzpah required to do that.

I’m now thinking of heading up the carnival committee next fall. Please, dear readers, either talk me out of it or give me suggestions for fun and cheap games/events for a lively and profitable school carnival. What – besides the ever-popular Cake Walk – are your favorite carnival games?

I’ve learned to trust a lot of conventional wisdom in the kitchen. New combinations can be great. Trying a new technique with a dish can yield delights. Finding one that works is exhilarating. But often there actually is a reason you’ve never had something before. I’ll never forget the first (and last) time I had that whole lobster-with-vanilla-infused-something. Not. For. Me.

This doesn’t mean I don’t experiment, I do. But my cooking, regular readers will notice, is more about good versions of the familiar; simple flavors well handled; slight twists to old favorites. My cooking is also about frugality, of making use of what is at hand, of not wasting perfectly good food.

I had my eye on those Asian pears from our CSA. They were starting to pile up. I like a crisp, sweet Asian pear as a snack, but even in season I don’t want one every day. And no one else in my house wants one at all – they’re too busy harvesting their own crunchy delights from the apple tree out back this time of year. I made a fennel and Asian pear salad – both major ingredients were very thinly sliced, drizzled with a bit of very tasty walnut oil, sprinkled with sea salt, and topped with a few freshly toasted walnuts. My dashing husband liked it, but said he’d prefer just the fennel.

Sigh.

So I did what I’d been told – by conventional kitchen wisdom – not to do. I baked the Asian pears. I quartered and cored and peeled and chopped 5 of them, tossed them with a tablespoon of cider vinegar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 teaspoon garam masala, 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom, 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger, and 1/8 teaspoon ground cloves, and put them in a 2-quart casserole. I then made a topping of 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour, 1/2 cup brown sugar, and 1/2 cup butter which I mushed together into a streusel-type thing with my fingers but which one could easily pulse up in a food processor if one didn’t live in completely unreasonable fear of having to wash the food processor bowl and top and blade and whatnot. I spread that mixture over the top and baked it all at 375 for about half an hour – until the pears were bubbling in the middle and the whole thing was a pretty brown.

For the record: Asian pears bake up just fine. They were sweet and tender and held their shape. That said, I’m sure Anjou or Bosc pears would be just as good and probably less expensive. But the advice to eat Asian pears raw is, I think, simply a result of the fact that they are so good raw – crispy and refreshing. If you have a mess of them and want to put them to work in a baked dessert, give it a try. I was delightfully surprised.

And that crisp? The leftovers really do make a most delicious breakfast. I’m just saying.

Necessity. Brilliance. Necessity. Brilliance. I’m going back and forth on this – I feel like a genius. I really do. I was making dinner – and, honestly, I wasn’t that into it. I was concocting something out of what was in the house and I was not excited about any of it, not particularly hungry, and not at all inspired. I got a little bit into creating some kind of very dry (not saucy) curry-type thing that was almost a stir-fry with chickpeas and sweet peppers and lots of black pepper.* While I was figuring that out I halved and seeded and started roasting two delicata squash in the toaster oven. I always start them dry and rub butter or whatever when they start to turn tender. I don’t know why I do that, but it’s my way.

So I have the onions browning for the chickpea thing and I check the squash (delicata, by the way, are a wonderfully sweet and, yes, delicate winter squash that cook up pretty quickly and are about a thousand times more interested as plain, roasted squash than either acorn or butternut – see more about winter squash varieties) and see that after about 15-20 minutes at 350 it’s getting tender. I go to the fridge to grab some butter to spread over the squash and see a big jar of white miso staring me in the face. Miso butter, I think, yum. As I pull the miso from the fridge I notice the small jar of homemade harissa sitting behind it. Hmmm, went my brain, a little spice on this chilly night would be nice….

So I mashed 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of white miso and about a teaspoon of harissa (although any thick-ist hot sauce would work, I believe) together and spread that all over the four squash halves and put them back in the toaster oven (at 375 now) to finish getting tender and browning up. It got very tender but not so brown so I cranked that poor little oven to 450. As you can see I maybe left them in there a minute or two longer than was absolutely necessary.

Big hit. Great success. As I said, brilliance. From necessity, but brilliance nonetheless. Ernest kept asking what was on the squash. I explained butter and miso and harissa. “But Mama,” he said a few times, “what is that?” I told him I had made it up. “So you get to name it?” he exclaimed. Yes, I suppose I did. His suggestion? Spicy miso butter sauce. Not too shabby. Direct, descriptive, appetizing (to us, anyway), SEO-friendly.

* It seems weird to sort of taunt you with it, so if it sounds good, here’s how to make it: Brown 1 chopped onion in a bit of oil over medium-high heat. Add three chopped sweet peppers (I used 1 red and 2 yellow which, yes, made for a very yellow dinner) and 1/2 teaspoon salt and cook until the peppers are tender. Add 3 cloves minced garlic and a bit of grated fresh ginger. Stir to combine. Add two cans of chickpeas and about 1/2 cup broth or water. Stir and cook until everything blends nicely and the liquid is mostly gone. Add a lot of freshly ground black pepper – to taste and sprinkle in some chopped parlsey or cilantro if you have some around. If you have all these ingredients sitting around and need to make something to eat, it’s a perfectly tasty and serviceable option.

After a week of frying up fritters at every chance I could, I then made doughnuts Sunday morning. I am now reverting to my relatively fry-free kitchen habits, but man are homemade doughnuts good. Doughnuts are one of those things that I never really got. Kind of like pizza (a subject about which I once gave an entire talk). They were always presented as big treats that I should be excited about, but as a kid I never found them very exciting or desirable. And then, at some point, as an adult I had really good versions of each of them and finally got it. The strange thing is, having really delicious pizza and doughnuts made me like the mediocre versions more, which is slightly counter-intuitive. My theory is that having had the delicious version, my brain now knows what they tastes like and experiences a bit of memory of it when I have the mediocre version. I still am no fan of thick, sweet American pizza pie or overly sweet or greasy doughnuts, but at least I’m on the same page with society at large – I understand why people are eating them even as I try to avoid them in search of less sweet, more delicate versions.

The extra fun thing about making doughnuts is that day-old doughnuts just aren’t nearly as good. Even no-longer-warm doughnuts lose a lot of their shine. My answer to this is to allow everyone to eat as many warm doughnuts as their hearts desire. Ernest and his friend who slept over could hardly believe their luck as their requests for another doughnut or another doughnut hole were filled and filled and filled again. They ate their fill at breakfast and then wanted some an hour or two later. “Sure!” I answered. They stood in stony silence, hardly believing their luck, wondering what alien had taken over my form.

Ernest has been a bit obsessed with doughnuts and the lack of them in our house ever since we read Farmer Boy last spring. All the ladies in the house know what I’m talking about – it’s part of the Little House series, about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s husband’s childhood on a prosperous farm in upstate New York. The thing is wall-to-wall food. They are constantly eating giant farm meals* and the book’s focus on the abundance of food highlights – for the adult reader familiar with the series anyway – how very deprived and not abundant Laura’s own childhood was. Salt pork and corn mush and long winters with not much at all.

With a doughnut-poor early childhood under his own belt, Ernest became fixated on the “doughnut jar” in the farm’s kitchen. Once a week, as part of baking day, the mom would fry up scads of doughnuts and put them in the doughnut jar and then the little boy in the story would just go and have a doughnut whenever he felt peckish. Ernest thought that sounded pretty awesome. I couldn’t help but point out that the little boy in the story did an awful lot of work (which got me thinking about how little most kids are expected to do these days – but that’s another blog entirely that I just don’t have time to write, what with my kid not pulling his weight….). As soon as we wake Ernest in the middle of the night to work until dawn watering the corn to save it from freezing, I will totally get a doughnut jar.

I made the above doughnuts thusly: Let 1 tablespoon of dry active yeast dissolve and foam in 1 cup of warm water. Then used the paddle on a standing mixer to incorporate 1/3 cup sugar, 1 1/4 cups whole wheat pastry flour, 1 egg, and 4 tablespoons of softened butter. Once that turned into a dough I worked in about 2 cups of all-purpose flour. I covered the bowl and let it rise for almost 3 hours (I had been planning on 2 but lost track of time watching The Hunt Locker). Then I rolled out the dough to about 1/2-inch thick and used a large round biscuit cutter (a drinking glass works too) to cut circles and the smallest round cutter I have to cut out the holes. I put all of these on floured baking sheets and covered them with plastic wrap. I left them out at room temp because it’s gotten chilly at night and our kitchen gets cold enough so I wasn’t too worried about the dough over-rising. Then I went to sleep.

At about 7:30 we heard the boys playing in Ernest’s room. At 8 they asked us to get down the parking garage from the high shelf so they could build a town. (They were not, I feel the need to note, trudging out into the cold to milk the cows or feed the horses; they were playing all snug and cozy in their jammies in Ernest’s colorful toy-filled room.) At 9 they asked for breakfast so I heated up about an inch or so of lard (vegetable oil or canola oil work just dandy too) in a big heavy pot. Once it was hot enough to make dough sizzle, I started frying. Until brown on one side, flip, let brown on the other side, lift out with tongs onto a cooling rack set over a baking sheet. Get the next batch going and then dip first batch in sugar – the dough itself isn’t terribly sweet, so the coating of sugar makes them just about perfect. Then I started handing them out.

One thing about frying that always astounds me – and I really noticed this time because I saved the lard (strained it to get the flour out) for future frying – is how, if the temperature of the fat is right (usually between 350 and 375), you end up “using” so little of it. The food absorbs hardly any. Get the temp right by using a thermometer or, a cool trick I learned that I use instead of a thermometer now, dipping a piece of bread or the end of a wooden spoon in the oil. If the oil sizzles immediately and steadily around the bread/wood, it’s ready; if it sizzles violently – bubbling up away from the pot, it’s too hot.

Once the doughnuts were all fried I kicked it with a few from the very last batch and a cup of coffee and stared out into the gray fog of this uncharacteristically dreary San Francisco October and swore I’d stop frying. For at least awhile.

* But one example:

There were slabs of tempting cheese, there was a plate of quivering headcheese; there were glass dishes of jams and jellies and preserves, and a tall pitcher of milk, and a steaming pan of baked beans with a crisp but of fat pork in the crumbling brown crust… Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth, He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckbrand of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie.

After dinner they then often had apples and cider and popcorn.

Our CSA box has been confusing lately. Lots of summer vegetables even as the skies are gray and the air is chilly. Such is the way of California living – the sweet corn never seems to end. But you know what? I’m pretty much done with sweet corn for the season. I was, actually, done with corn on the cob way back in August.

So when I unpacked the box this week and found four more ears of corn down at the bottom, I scraped off the kernels, beat in an egg and a few tablespoons of flour and turned them into fritters in but a thin layer of vegetable oil in a large pot. I served them hot with a quick chutney of mint, cilantro, a jalapeno chile, garlic, lemon juice, and a bit of salt. My dashing husband preferred them simply sprinkled with salt because they were so “delicate,” which is really saying something because that man loves himself some spicy.

Two nights later, the pile of zucchini that had been next to the corn taunted me. Fritatta? Pasta? Salad? We’ve had plenty of zucchini versions of all three. You know what we hadn’t had? Zucchini fritters.

Yum. Made with four smallish zucchini, grated, mixed with an egg and two tablespoons of flour. Recipe-style recipes for Corn Fritters and Zucchini Fritters at Local Foods, but seriously, it’s about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of grated veg, an egg, and two tablespoons flour. If it seems super loose, add another tablespoon of flour. A bit of salt and pepper, and you’re good to pan-fry them.

Then things got completely out of control and I used some frozen corn (it was sitting in the freezer, leftover from a very sad bout of recipe testing) to make corn fritters for breakfast yesterday. No, it wasn’t really right. But yes, it was very very delicious.

Along with all those deviled eggs I also baked up an apple pie this weekend. I used apples from the tree in our backyard*, so I have no idea what kind they were, but they did bake up nice and soft while still keeping their shape – and that is, of course, an important element of an awesome apple pie.

Just as important, obviously, is the crust. I’ve recently written about my love of the part-butter part-lard crust (see a recipe-style recipe for the crust at Local Foods), so I’ll refrain from going on about it again – but it was amazingly flaky and flavorful.

Perfect apple pie, in my assessment, also tastes like apples. Sure a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg and other warm spices should be in there, but I prefer apple pies in which they highlight rather than overwhelm the apple flavor. With that in mind, I made the filling using 5 apples (quartered, cored, peeled, and chopped and tossed with 1 Tbsp. lemon juice), 1/4 cup each brown and white sugar, 2 Tbsp. flour, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg, 1/8 tsp. salt. I poured that in the bottom crust, dotted it with about 2 Tbsp. butter, covered the whole thing with a second crust, and baked it at 450 for 15 minutes and 350 for well over an hour. But then, I like my pie crust really, really cooked.

* Our apple tree is the bane of my backyard experience. My grudges against the tree are many. First and foremost the tree itself is ugly. It is one of those multi-variety grafted numbers with three varieties growing on one tree which, as a fact by itself, is awesome but which, in practice on this particular tree, has led – along with very poor pruning at some point – to a very ugly shape. Second, it stands right in the middle of a small yard. Since it is a dwarf variety, it blocks the visual line from any spot in the yard to any other. Third, the apples attract rats. I know the rats would be there anyway – we live in the middle of a city and there are rats outside. That is an unpleasant fact. We are happy to not have them in the house at the moment. But I find half-gnawed apples still hanging on the tree, sitting on the ground under the tree, and dragged to sundry spots around our tiny yard and that is nasty. Fourth, it isn’t the tree’s fault, but I just don’t like apples enough to put up with the first three reasons. If I’m going to have a tree that attracts rats, I want cherries or pears in exchange. So this is the last fall we’ll have apples in our backyard. As soon as we get all the fruit we’re going to get this year, that sucker is coming down. I have an ax and everything.

I’ve been unplugged for about 24 hours now. Not completely unplugged, but off twitter and off facebook and not reading blogs because I just can’t read any more laments about the closing of Gourmet. I’m right there with others in the food world – particularly the food writing world – in my disappointment to see a fine food publication shuttered. I have some extra blah about it, too. Someone/someones were faced with the decision to close either Gourmet or Bon Appetit and they chose Gourmet. Nothing against Bon App, but Gourmet was one of those magazines that still had these things called words and stories in it, not just pictures and recipes, and I liked that. I’m sure it was a business decision – I know the Gourmet numbers were down even more than the horribly depressed Bon App numbers – but one way or another it’s a reminder that I’m not the target audience (a fact my dad once gently pointed out when I expressed dismay at some sports car ad when I was in my early and very outraged teens). People want pretty pictures and recipes in their food magazines, and not quite so much yackety-yack and crazy, interesting rather than purely pretty shots of the food. Where, I ask, does that leave the food writer? Or, rather, the writer who likes to write about food? What message can one take that isn’t a bit of a giant bummer? But, as I said, I’m tired of the laments, and so I will end my own.

Before the Monday Gourmet-closing blues hit, I spent the weekend going to parties. It was fabulous. Since I found myself in possession of a large number of pastured eggs (those from hens who spend their time actually running around a field scratching for bugs), I made crazy numbers of deviled eggs and brought plates of them all over town. Regular readers may notice that I don’t tend to get too excited about serving ware and styling – it’s never been my thing. But when it comes to deviled eggs I’m in possession of two particularly well-suited plates. That actual deviled egg plate with divots for the eggs pictured above, suitable for dinner parties (especially those thrown by a friend from Atlanta, a Southern girl who appreciates rarefied things like plates just for serving deviled eggs) and this bright plastic number better suited for toting deviled eggs to a raucous house-warming party at which I was offered a certain dessert (wink, wink) that had to be hidden from the children in attendance.

I’m sure you already have a fabulous recipe for deviled eggs (perhaps your mother cut it out of Gourmet at some point?), but, just in case, I make them by first, of course, hard-boiling however many eggs I’m going to need, usually at least six, so let’s say six – that’s easy to double to a dozen and keep doubling as the party requires.

So you start with six eggs. Put them in a medium saucepan and cover them with water. Bring to a boil. Cover and take off heat and let sit, covered mind you, for 14 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water and peel.

Cut the eggs in half lengthwise and scoop out the yolks into a small bowl. You can push them through a sieve if you want to be super-fancy, but my lord is that a mess to clean so I never do it. Add a tablespoon each of softened butter and mayonnaise. You can also add a teaspoon of mustard, which I like and put into one batch but left out of another batch because one of the other people at the party really doesn’t like mustard and I didn’t miss it at all. Mash this all up with a fork and add salt and pepper to taste. Spoon the mixture back into the eggs (you can use a pastry bag to make this fancy but, again, what a mess to clean up). I like to garnish them with either minced chives or a bit of paprika. I played around with smoked paprika and hot paprika and, honestly, it made almost no difference at all because the aroma was lost by the time the eggs were served.

I added about a teaspoon of capers, minced within an inch of their lives, to one batch and that was delicious. Sweet pickle is another fine option, as are herbs of all sorts.

I try to make deviled eggs in a timely manner so they never go into the fridge after being cooked – the texture is a bit lovelier that way. They can, however, be covered and chilled for a day before serving.

“Mama, it’s like a pizza!” Ernest said brightly when he bit into it.

It was like pizza, but with a pie/tart crust. So, in the end, not really like a pizza at all. But is was round and baked and topped with tomato and cheese, so the comparison certainly makes some sense.

What it was, in fact, was delicious. Much richer than pizza, of course. It was, perhaps, a little extra rich since I used half butter and half lard to make the crust – it’s my new thing and it is awesome, such flaky and flavorful crust I have never known, I swear. Mix 1 1/4 cup flour and 1/2 tsp. salt in a medium or large bowl. Cut in 4 Tbsp. butter and 4 Tbsp. lard until you have a corn meal-looking mixture with some larger chunks in it (a few can even be as large as a pea). You can cut in the fat with a pastry cutter, two knives, a fork, or, as I do, with your cool little fingers as long as you work a bit quickly. Stir in 3 Tbsp. ice cold water to form a dough. Dump dough onto a very well floured surface, knead it a few times to get it to hold together, and pat it into a disk about 6 inches across. Wrap the disk in plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes and up to several days if you like to plan ahead. The dough is very soft and so needs to be well-chilled before you roll it out.

After chilling, return dough to that very well-floured surface to which you have added more flour to return it to its well-floured condition after patting the disk into shape. Roll dough out to desired shape and size – for this tart about 12 inches across. Turn the dough about 90 degrees after each pass of the rolling pin. This ensures that the dough isn’t sticking. If it does start to even seem like it’s thinking about sticking, lift half the dough up and throw a bit of flour underneath. Again, this dough is soft, which means it would very much like to try and stick to things. Don’t worry if it breaks or cracks – just patch it up. It will still taste divine and it will let everyone know you made it yourself.

I owe the entire concept, the very idea for this tomato tart to Sam over at Chews Wise, who, after making a peach galette much like my peach crostada, used the remaining tart dough to make a savory tart of “sauteed leeks, mustard and tomatoes, and basil. You cook the galette crust flat for 10 minutes, then take out, schmear on mustard, put on leeks, tomatoes and basil and put back in oven for another 20 minutes or so. You don’t fold the edge over, just leave it flat, like pizza.” He got the idea from a 2003 New York Times story.

And he was right, it is a perfect dish for my blog. But I didn’t smear anything with mustard, I smeared the partially-baked crust with some of the tomato conserva I made, added sliced tomatoes and a bit of fresh mozzarella, sprinkled the whole thing with salt and called it dinner.

A note on pie crust: See the crust in the picture? See how it is past golden and heading straight into brown territory? That is what properly cooked pie crust looks like. Cooked pie crust, in fact, smells of cooked pie crust. There is a trend afoot of bakeries and restaurants and, I’m sure, home cooks, of not baking pies and tarts all the way. It’s like the half-cooked tender-crisp way with vegetables has spread into the pastry world. While hot-but-crisp asparagus is a fine thing, a pale and half-baked crust is an unfortunate creature unable to stand up to fillings, never meeting its full flaky potential. The phrase “half-baked” is a negative descriptor exists for a reason. Bake that crust!