Sour Cherry Tart

(A culinary quest)

This is a sour cherry tart with a vanilla custard.
I will choose this as my last dessert.

Cooking, for me, isn't just about meeting the needs of the body. It's about artistry, science, and the pursuit of perfection. Not a toxic perfection that eats away at my self esteem, nor an impossible perfection such as sculpting the best ass is. I feel a great deal of pleasure in being able to do things well and cooking offers everyone the chance to make something well because of the enormous range of possibilities. If bread baking sounds like as much fun as walking across the Mohave desert barefoot and with no sunscreen, one doesn't need to bake bread. You can make soup instead.

About seven years ago I decided that I was going to master the art of baking tarts. When I say "master" I mean that I wanted to be able to make tarts consistently well, but not just well, I wanted people to eat my tarts and then not be able to stop thinking about it for long after the last crumb was pressed into a fork. There's more though, a tart should be a thing of beauty.

Tarts really aren't difficult to make. But making them well requires that you refine your skills at achieving each step. The first step is making a really good crust. Some people have trouble with this but I follow Martha Stewart's recipe, using my food processor to mix it, and the only trick I've found works well is to completely freeze the rolled out pastry dough before prebaking it. This usually prevents the crust from bubbling up. Two things, I've found, can really mess up a tart dough: adding too much water to the dough will make it hard where the dough is extra wet, and only using half the amount of butter is not recommended.

The vanilla custard* is the next part to master. I have found making a good vanilla custard challenging because the first time I made it it was perfect (and easy) but I could never remember which recipe I followed and I ended up trying a string of recipes that I had no difficulty messing up. A good recipe is really important. I don't like a rich custard with tons of egg yolks and heavy cream. I have finally found a recipe for a lighter custard that reliably turns out well from the book "Tartine". I used 2% milk (even though it calls for whole milk) and it turned out really well. The biggest challenge is preventing it from being lumpy and my only advice on this challenge is to stir frequently and use a whisk.

Once you have a great crust and a great pastry cream all you have to do is figure out what you want to put on top. My favorite desert of all time (OF ALL TIME) is a fresh fruit tart with vanilla custard, but this is winter, I can't buy kiwis from New Zealand, so I had to think about alternatives from the pantry. I'm misleading you there, I didn't have to think about it at all. All summer I was thinking about how my fruit preserves might be used in the winter to crown some lovely tarts. I was just waiting for the right opportunity.

Luckily I am usually the only one in my family who puts up a fight to preserve traditions like having yams every year with Thanksgiving dinner. It was not difficult to convince my mom, my sister, and Philip to let me bypass the whole pumpkin deal in favor of these tarts.

The result? My mom and my sister think that I have achieved my goal of mastery over the tart. We talked about those tarts for a full half hour after eating them. My family even indulged me in my favorite game of trying to figure out how they might be made even more perfect.

Now all I have to do is keep making them for the next thirty years (if I live that long) until I achieve fame among my friends and family for my tart making abilities. How will I know I've gotten there? I'll know when people start always asking me brightly if I am going to bring one of my tarts to the potluck? I'll know when I hear people talking about tarts past.

I think everyone should settle on one thing to master in the kitchen. Maybe you can master almost everything but you should aim to be known for making something in particular better than all else-it's great for your self esteem and it increases your pleasure in preparing food for others. It's fun to follow a food quest anyway. It's kind of like being a culinary knight only you're less likely to be impaled by a jousting stick.

Just as a side note, I can't make pie worth a damn.

Yesterday my mom, sister, and I went to the Portland farmer's market and I was impressed with the variety still available. This particular farmer's market continues through December 22. I've been meaning to buy some locally grown wild rice and was very pleased to find it there-so I bought a couple of packages of it. I also found (to my great excitement) that one stall had some gorgeous cilantro. I bought four bunches and plan to freeze it in ice cube size portions. I will report on how well it freezes as soon as I know. Cilantro isn't known to retain it's flavor well when dried. I'm sure those farmers are thinking I must be some kind of freak getting inordinately excited to have found fresh cilantro. Who cares? I thought I wouldn't find any more until mid-spring. I plan to make some black bean chili!

By the way, for those of you waiting on packages from Dustpan Alley, they are all ready to go and will be mailed early tomorrow morning. Thank you for your patience! The bath bombs are doing so well I've had to make new batches and am now in need of new supplies which I better get soon. I've gotten much better at making them and if people would like a tutorial I will put one together. Though, I did find some good ones out there already (my previous searches did not yield great directions. Sometimes a single word in a search makes ALL the difference.) I think the bombs would make excellent stocking stuffers and although they can be tricky (I ruined three batches last week), I think they are still easy enough for anyone to try. Each bath bomb costs about fifty cents each to make which makes it really an affordable homemade project.

I'm off to work at the Holiday Market downtown. I hope you all have a great Sunday!