Seasonal Fruits

One of my earliest experiences as a chef's assistant was for Carla Snyder at a Food Festival weekend in Morgantown, West Virginia. She is an incredible baker and my favorite all-time recipe comes from her. The original recipe was for a pear tart, but you can easily substitute any seasonal fruit or fruit of choice. This week, I made a seasonally fresh berry tart with locally grown strawberries and blueberries (that we picked ourselves at Lewis' Farms!) and added raspberries and blackberries. The tart is a free-form tart, which yields a beautiful and rustic pie/tart. Carla's dough recipe produces a scrumptious, home-made pastry that is perfectly crusty and melt in your mouth delicious. She also has you make an almond frangipane paste that is spread onto the rolled out dough before you pile on the fruit. When I make rhubarb tarts, I leave the frangipane out and make my mom's rhubarb pie filling instead --- now that version is my all time favorite dessert. Ever. Served cold, for breakfast. Mmmmmmm. =)  But I digress.....

The tart I made yesterday was for a friend who was hosting a women's group. She wanted something yummy and different, and although we first talked about doing something chocolaty... I got excited about the fresh fruit and doing this tart. Luckily, she loved it!

The blueberry muffins were for a Church bake sale. I tried the America's Test Kitchen blueberry muffin recipe, and I have to say..... it was not worth the trouble. They are very good muffins, do not get me wrong. But again I go back to my mom's recipes and she has in incredible blueberry cake that I have adapted for muffins. They are every bit as good as this new recipe, but far less time consuming and complicated. But they sure were pretty!