salt n’ peppa

I thought that I’d share this fantastic salt and pepper set with you. You know me, I’m all about the bibLOL. I’m pretty sure that I need a Garden of Eden salt and pepper shaker set.

home grown

There’s a lot to be said for beautiful, fresh from the garden produce. And I don’t mean fresh from the garden in an it was picked earlier this week way or even in an it was picked yesterday sense. I mean in the I just plucked this off the vine definition. I mean that my feet are still covered in rich, dark earth and the strawberry bush is brushing my leg.

Home garden vegetables are never the most perfect looking creatures. The strawberries were tiny, finger nail sized and lumpy but they were the sweetest berries I’ve ever had. They tasted exactly like strawberries ought to with so very much flavor packed into each tiny one of them. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I didn’t share with my dad. The tomatoes were sunshiny and acidic and the green beans were sweet and firm and snappy. All in all, it was a mighty fine harvest.

Plum Tarts

I had intended to make perfect, light as air squares of puff pastry with little quarter moons of plum on top. I had picked some plums from the trees outside my house and wanted to do something worthy of them. I even made sure that I picked up some puff pastry (something I am never going to waste my time making from scratch) and left it in my kitchen to thaw so that it would be ready to use.

I put a great deal of effort into picking the just right plums for my tarts. I’m taking them to Fists’ house for our vampire marathon and they need to be perfect. My plums were just this side of ripe so that they lend a delightful bit of sour to the whole affair. They were pitted, sliced and left to soak in a little honey and rose water, adopt a depth of flavour.

And then I checked my puff pastry, rising under a tea towel in a lovely dappled patch of mid afternoon sun. Mid afternoon sun that was too damn hot for something as finicky as puff pastry and had heated it to far, melting all the butter out into a gooey, glistening pool around paper thin layers of pastry. I was ruined, of course. All of my hard work for nothing. Only, puff pastry – once all the butter has melted away like this – looks an awful lot like philo dough. All those delicate little sheets.

So I improvised. I missed out on sanitized, symmetrical little squares of buttery pastry. I got rustic, ruffled edges of tarts with a graceless, enticing pile of stone fruit glistening in the center instead. I hardly think my tarts suffered for it.

And this just means they are marginally lower in fat!