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Farmers Market Desserts ~ my summer in stone fruit tarts

 
I love that this tart looks like a flying saucer ready to descend on the Financial District below. Someone was actually holding this tart up for me to photograph it, but it's as if it's suspended there by the Power of Pastry, because no arm can be seen.

This year has been exceedingly packed with work and joyful events and a few trips, and as the fall settled in and got comfortable I got antsy to make the most of the rest of the year, and focus more on my own work. I was beginning to feel like the summer had whizzed by me, and with it the year, because doesn't everything from here feel like a slippery downhill?

Then I sat down to look through pictures from this summer, and time began to slow down. I think I understand what Shauna meant when she professed her love of escaping with photography to a "place without words." Those places are good for all of us to have. Even though I now look at my photos with a much more critical eye and see all the room for improvement after going to Blogher Food, I am also just happy to have captured moments over the summer I might have otherwise forgotten.

 
I will never forget when, after I had mourned missing sour cherry season, my friends stopped by one Sunday afternoon with a giant armful of sour cherries they had picked from a neglected tree, just so I could make pie. I am only sorry now that they didn't get to eat said pie. Thanks to Jennie Schacht, whose Deep-Dish Sour Cherry Pie  had knocked me out at the Omnivore Books Pie Contest last year, I knew exactly which recipe to try. Always a lover of stone fruit (anything with a pit and soft flesh, including apricots, cherries, plums, nectarines, peaches and even avocado), I really savored baking this summer from her cookbook Farmers' Market Desserts.

inspiration is a rising tide

 
 

Hopefully I don't get blacklisted for posting this grainy point n' shoot of Michael Ruhlman, because it makes me grin, and grins are in short supply these days. This was just before the closing keynote at BloghHer Food conference this weekend, and Ruhlman was getting ready to bring it on the ballroom stage along with Shauna and Molly. At the conclusion of what was already a great conversation between these three writers, Ruhlman was compelled to stand and remind us that cooking is important (and according to anthropologist Richard Wrangham cooking is what makes us human) pacing the stage with the kind rhetorical passion I can only describe as...Mr. Ruhlman Goes to Washington. I would like to thank him for the boost. Well, I want to thank everyone there, actually. I only made it to one day of the conference, but the lift I got makes me feel like a boat that was dry docked all winter and suddenly plopped into the bay on a warm and fogless autumn afternoon.