My Rustic Fruit Tart

Reporting back on my efforts to make the rustic fruit tart...... My recipe, How to Make a Rustic Fruit Tart, was from my favorite cooking magazine, Fine Cooking, September 2005, #73. This was one of their series of Cooking Without Recipes which gives you some basics and then suggestions on how to vary the ingredients. I'd like to be able to refer you to the recipe on line but Fine Cooking doesn't have all, not even most of their recipes on line. I always buy the bound version of last year's recipes so that I can keep them but it is still a pain to remember a recipe and not be able to remember the year so I have to go back through several of the books to find the recipe.

I had been thinking about making this recipe for some time. It just seemed to be so cozy. Like something you would walk into your kitchen and whip up after you found the perfect apples or peaches in the market. Nothing pretentious and yet it would say that you are a good cook. I could see serving it in the summer after a meal of grilled chicken and grilled vegetables or in the winter after grilled pork chops with sauteed red cabbage. But then I would remember my track record with a pastry dough.

Yesterday I was brave. I bought the apples to do it. The pastry dough turned out okay but as you can see from the picture above it wasn't beautiful. The picture in the magazine showed it with perfect flutes as it folded back over the apples. First off, I realized that I didn't have my Kitchen Aide mixer....sold in the estate sale. Nor did I have a pastry cutter so it took a while to incorporate the butter and the flour. But the biggest shock came when it was time to roll out the dough. I don't have a pastry roller either. I used a 4" diameter tall candle wrapped in plastic wrap. Not ideal but it got the job done. Rolling out the dough is where I always seem to get into trouble. I get cracks around the edges and no matter how I flour the board, it will stick to the surface. Oh, another thing I don't have is a pastry knife either.

Now my mother just threw flour here and there and she could pick up her pie crusts and flip them over, then fold them in half, lay them in the pie pan and open it again without it sticking to any surface or tearing. How did she do that? I watched her do it so many times but I think she just had some magic flour or something that I couldn't see!

This time I managed to get the dough more or less intact on to the parchment paper in the pan, pile the fruit on top and fold up the edges but I had visions of the juice from the fruit running out of the dough and over and under the parchment paper. A little of the juices escaped but most of it stayed in the tart. And the apple tart was pretty good.

The recipe suggested that you serve it with a dollop of ice cream or whipped cream but when I make the apple tart version again, I think I'd serve it with a dollop of a whipped vanilla mascarpone topping. I think the delicate cheese flavor would be great with the apple tart.