an abundance of plums

Plums are in season right now, and I had a lot of plums yesterday. Too many, really. An overabundance of plums is what it was.

So, I decided to do something. I decided to take control of the situation. I went online and found the recipe for something called a Rustic Plum Tart on epicurious.com. Then I made some pastry dough.

I love making pastry dough. There's something so homey and simple about it. I once wrote a line in a novel about Willie Nelson and "that voice of his which was all man, but also as comforting as someone’s big-bosomed grandmother with freckles on her arms and pastry dough stuck to her fingers." That's how much I like pastry dough (and Willie). And I've been waiting a long, long time to unpack my pastry cloth and rolling pin and finally put them to good use. The plums gave me the perfect excuse to do just that.


After I'd mixed the sliced plums with sugar, cinnamon and ginger, there were concentric circles to make, and much folding to do at somewhat careful angles. It was like plum geometry, and I was never much good at geometry. Also, I definitely managed to put the "R" in "Rustic."

But, oh, it smelled so good as it baked. Apparently, some random critter thought so, too, because doesn't it look like a little mouse or something (something like a blogger with the munchies, perhaps) got a little too into sampling the result with its little, bloggy fingers?

In fact, it smelled, looked and tasted so good that when daughter and her BFF got off the school bus, they were most interested in helping me use up the rest of the plum/sugar/cinnamon/ginger mixture. So, we made a second tart, which went home with BFF when her dad came to pick her up.

Here's the sunset we saw from the front yard after they drove away and before we dove into tart #1, decimating half of it in one fell swoop.

Sadly, this morning I woke up with a head cold. The good news is there is still half of a rustic plum tart sitting on the counter. And plums have lots of vitamin C, right?

Follow @nicole_mcinnes