I'm a Tart, You're a Tart

Eat a tart.

It doesn't have to be pretty, big, or take all night. In fact, this tart's juicy, cheap and easy going down.

It all started with the strawberries, on sale, at Whole Foods. Organic strawberries, from this coast, on sale! After a winter's worth of kale and yams, those ruby gems sailed into my cart with visions of summer and the sharp, green smell of berry vines hot in the sun. Strawberries aren't my favorite summer berry, but they are beautiful and sweet, and the shocking accumulation of black bananas in our freezer tells me we're due for a change in fruitage.

But I couldn't leave well enough alone. After 1 day of fresh strawberry snacking I was hit by a pang to do something with them. I tried to ignore the pang by grading reading journals, but the berries called to me like seeded sirens--a song made more persuasive by the asinine quality of student comments, like the following, which made me question why I bother:
"I have never had, nor taken any interest in America, especially politics."
Note the redundant phrasing. Note the apathy. Feed this child to the Kracken.


After ten of those, messing around with butter, flour and fruit sounded downright stimulating. I did some food blogging research and found an easy recipe at The Kitchen Sink for a rustic, low-fat strawberry tart.

Hey, I was dubious about the "low-fat," too. But it turns out that you can make a flaky crust with half the butter. Is it as delicious? I'm not going to lie--probably not. But I felt a little better about eating it and now you can, too.

Rustic Strawberry Tart: adapted somewhat freely from The Kitchen Sink (serves 4)

• 1 C flour
• 3 T cold as ice butter, in pieces, Plus a little extra for dotting on top of the tart
• 1/8 tsp salt
• 3-5 T ice water (I needed 5)
• 2-3 handfuls of strawberries
• 1/4 tsp almond extract (or lemon/lime/orange zest or liqueur)
• 1/8 C sugar or more, depending on your sweet tooth
• 1-2 T cornstarch
• a bit of heavy cream to wash the dough before baking

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter a cookie sheet (or use parchment).
2. Dump the flour and salt into a bowl. Add butter and cut into the flour using two knives, a pastry cutter, or your fingers. You want to the butter-flour mixture to resemble rough cornmeal, with a few pea-sized butter lumps.
3. Drizzle 3 T of ice water into the bowl, adding just enough to dampen the dough and allow it to come together in a rough ball. Add more water if needed.
4. Turn the dough out of the bowl, and knead just a few times so that it coalesces in a decent ball. Place the ball between two sheets of plastic wrap, and roll into a nice disk. Chill for at least 30 minutes.
5. Meanwhile, toss sliced strawberries with almond extract, sugar and cornstarch.
6. When the dough is ready, roll it into one or more rough rounds. Layer the strawberry slices (working in concentric circles), leaving 1-2 inches of bare dough on the ends.*
7. Fold the sides of the circle up around the strawberries (forming a bowl), pinching where necessary to hold the shape. Brush the sides with cream.
8. Dot a bit of butter on top of the strawberries, and sprinkle the whole pastry with sugar.
9. Bake for 30-45 minutes, until golden brown and bubbly.

*I left 2 inches, as per the original instructions, and felt upon tasting that I had too much pastry on the top of the tart.

Carrot Cake Sandwich Cookies

Crunchy, oaty, not too sweet. Grated carrot and walnut chunks. Rich cream cheese filling.

These lovely cookies soften with time, so don't worry if they're a bit too crunchy for your taste when you first remove them from the oven (I know they were for me). They can be served solo and iced on the top, or as you see above, turned into the cutest 2-bite sandwich cookies. There's something about a homemade sandwich cookie that makes people swoon: I hid the cookies on top of the theatre fridge yesterday to ensure that they'd make it to the cast party, and the house manager was still fending people off! The sandwich shape also invited lots of aesthetic commentary, the least appealing of which --though perhaps the most accurate--was that they look like little hamburgers. I prefer "little nubbly bites of fun," but that is a mouthful. (Ha! Get it?)

Adapted, slightly, from Bon Appetit May 2010 edition.

Soak 1/4 raw oats and 1/4 C raisins (optional) in 1/4 water.

Cream together: 1 stick butter; 1/2 C brown sugar; 1/2 C white sugar.

Add 1 egg, mix. Add in 1 C finely grated carrot (about 1 largish) and the oat mixture.

Add 1 1/2 C self-rising flour, 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon and 1/2 C walnut pieces. Mix well (I used my hands).

Drop cookies (1 level Tb each) onto greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 18-20 minutes, depending on the kind of crunch you like.

When the cookies are cool, ice them with the following comixture:

1 C powdered sugar, 6 ounces cream cheese (or neufchatel, which is a little lower in fat), 2 T lemon juice, 2 T whipping cream, and 1/2 stick butter. Mix well until smooth.

Note: This makes WAY too much icing, so feel free to halve the recipe or freeze the remainder for a future batch of cinnamon rolls or carrot cake.

Samedi, Still Life

I'm taking a four-day weekend. I have a lot of little errands to attend to and also just need some r&r. Yesterday, the first day of staycation, was lovely: deep cleaned the first floor of our apartment, ran errands on my bike in the sunshine, bought a sexy dress at Buffalo Exchange, ate Thai green papaya salad and Thai iced coffee on the warm bench outside the theatre, finished the night with a glass of Cabernet at our crappy, beloved mainstay bar, Tennessee Reds.

Today's been a little less productive, although I can now officially call myself Mrs. Walton, as the Social Security Administration and the DMV now have my married name on the books. My new photo is awful (don't get your picture taken early on a Saturday morning, at the local mall's express DMV, amidst the aggressions and sweaty bodies of strangers' families, wearing no makeup and your glasses).
I'm excited.

Since then I've spent the last couple of hours on the couch, reading the first genuinely difficult novel I've read in ages: A. S. Byatt's Still Life. It's a very cold novel, edging on literary and art criticism, but with interesting enough characters and ambiguous enough relationships to maintain my interest. I wouldn't say I like it, exactly, but I'm intrigued by it. Byatt is smart, economical and pretentious. Her characters aren't likable but they are full of the niggling doubts about marriage and love and intellectual satisfaction that most people share, and they are all deeply flawed. I find myself offended by Francesca's disinterest in her Provencal adventures, but also recognizing my fifteen year-old self, in Spain in 1996, in her cultural detachment and embarrassed homesickness. Likewise, Stephanie and Daniel's marriage seems so lonely to me, and yet marriage is ultimately a permanent union of two, and not, realistically, the Hallmark ideal of two making one. So the isolation each feels within their love...I think this is true.

But philosophizing about life by Byatt, while stimulating, is too melancholy on this grey and chilly day. It's time to rise from the couch and fold the laundry. Make some carrot cake cookies. Paint my toenails.

Ward off Monday, and enjoy the peace of a quiet afternoon with nothing of consequence to do.

Pizza Sunday

Homemade boule dough, marinated hot Hungarian peppers, salami, feta, tomato sauce, roast potato (on the left) and radicchio (on the right).


Pizza night.

The pictures aren't great (once the sun goes down, the lighting in our apartment really goes down hill), but the pizza was. A little too thick--when will I learn to flip dough?-and a teensy bit scorched, but that gave it a wood-fired oven taste. T gave it two thumbs up, and he's been picky lately. I had to eat an entire brisket by myself! This is what marriage does to you; summons from within incredible sacrifice.

I've been making pizza quite a bit lately, experimenting with unusual ingredients: rainbow chard, softly set eggs, garlic and olive oil, brie and butternut squash, dried figs, prosciutto and Parmesan. Not too much cheese, so that the other flavors shine. Tonight's mix of spicy, salty and a little vinegary was a keeper.

Today's menu also featured brioche cinnamon rolls, so be sure to check out the Merry Bakers blog. And if you live nearby and want a roll...well, come on by. Brioche is most definitely for sharing. (Unlike pizza. Pizza is for hording. And for breakfast.)

It was a Dark and Stormy Night

Perfect for brisket with caramelized onions and carrots and dilly, buttered potatoes, and a date with Arrested Development. Perfect for cleaning the bathroom. Perfect for bread.

I haven't baked bread in weeks, due to rehearsals and grading deadlines and Passover. So tonight, as the sun sinks and Passover falls with it, I'm making rustic boules.

I decided to go back to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, chiefly because the next Merry Bakers project is brioche, and that's too rich for a daily bread. I'll probably make brioche this weekend and then T and I can enjoy decadent cinnamon rolls. Preferably in bed, with strong tea and the impetus to go nowhere and do nothing. I'm feeling that impetus more and more lately, a result of a freezing, rainy spring and too much work. Baking bread at least lends the illusion of leisure and time; it's such a patient process that I can't help but be calmed by it.

I'm sure I've written about Artisan Bread. It's a great bread book because the recipes produce exactly what is advertised: tasty, crusty bread that needs literally 5 minutes of mixing and, later, 5 minutes of shaping. Plus, the dough requires no kneading and lasts 2 weeks in the fridge. I've yet to get the airy crumb I expect from artisan bread, but that could be the recipes' lack of a prefermentation process. Or the instant yeast. Or my technique, which is being slowly honed. At the very least, the results are always really tasty (the longer you leave the dough in the fridge, the more flavor it acquires), and I like the versatility of the standard recipe, which makes ciabatta, baguette, focaccia, pizza dough, etc. My eventual goal is to produce crusty, airy bread made from natural yeast, collected from my home environment, but I'm willing to take my time getting there. As I said, bread is a patient art. It teaches me stillness.

Tonight's project is boules, which are round French loaves slashed at the top. You bake them at a very high heat, and the result is a golden brown crust that shatters a bit when you first slice down on it, and then gives way to a dense, soft crumb. This bread is so good with a slice of cheese and apple, or dipped into olive oil. In the summer I like to broil slices rubbed with garlic and topped with smashed cherry tomatoes, feta cheese and cracked pepper. The best breakfast ever.

So, as the rain pounds on my windows and scares the cats, I dream of my first bite of bread in 8 days and I make that dream come true.