Well, I’m back from California. But I suppose that I should have told you that I was going upon leaving. The first of two trips back this summer, aaahh, it is wedding season! Bring on the bouquets; bring on the bridesmaids; and bring on the catered food. Northern California was actually cold when we arrived, balmy and breezy, with a thick layer of marine fog in the morning. Cold though it may have been, the inclement weather did not keep the farmers from harvesting every sort of stellar local produce possible and bringing it to market
California was inspiring. I guess you cannot take the state out of a girl who was born and raised there. There were pies to be made at my parent’s house, with a mixture of stone fruit, and boysenberries so plump they looked like the belly of Santa Claus. [...]

There is just something about a tart…exemplifying the flavors of the season, homey, a delight to behold. And they are even better when you have it all to yourself, to savor or to share, to nibble or to hog. A diminutive bite, savory with vine-ripened tomatoes and sweet with yellow corn, made a sublime, hand-held lunch to enjoy on a warm summer’s day.
By far the hardest part of making this tart is producing the dough, and that was really not so difficult. A few weeks ago, I made a peach pie; the pie turned out wonderfully, but getting there was almost a disaster. The dough was so short, so impossible to roll out, it had me crying in exasperation over my sliced peaches. So this time around, for my corn and tomato tartlettes, I scrapped the new recipes and went back to a tried and true one, a dough that [...]

I live around the corner from a pretty amazing market. A place where six different varieties of eggplant happily cohabitate with mounds of garlic chives, where buckets of freshly made tofu sit chilling not far away from briny, sea-water oysters. This time of year, with such a bounty of produce, is a superb season to experiment, experience new flavors. Whenever I see something at the market I have yet to try, something that peaks my interest, I have to give it (or them in this case) a shot.

I had read a lot about Fiddlehead Ferns in cooking books and magazines, but here in California, these beauties, scavenged in the wild by foragers, were only culinary lore. I never had seen them at any grocer’s or farmer’s market. So when I saw them at the market, curled up tightly like a porcine tail, I just had to buy a passel to [...]