Viking Funeral for Summertime

Bad news: summer is over, and we all need to get our shit together. It’s time to finish writing the newsletter posts that have been languishing on our dashboards since July. To put on long pants and sweaters, to boil some tea to keep warm. Even worse, it’s time to read everybody else’s newsletters, piled like cordwood in our inboxes.

It’s time to come back indoors. We could stay out there in the yard, laying in the green grass with our dogs until it goes brown, and then we are covered with dead leaves, and finally with snow. At least the dogs wouldn’t mind.

Even worse, it’s time to stop eating tomatoes. We could keep eating them as they inevitably transform into the flavorless water balloons that we barely tolerate in our sandwiches and sad salads for the next ten months, but that might be a bummer. Best to just stop just cold turkey, right now, and wait for next year. In the meantime, we will have pumpkins, I guess?

Summer is fleeting, and the change of seasons isn’t optional. So we should try to concentrate on the good things. We drove up to the house last night, and when we got out of the car the air was full of woodsmoke: not from a Canadian forest burning down, but a neighbor’s cozy campfire.

It’s raining, and it will be all day. The river is already too cold for swimming, but that’s perfect for going to the movies. There’s a sequel to Beetlejuice playing tonight at our favorite theater, maybe it will be worth a damn? We won’t even look at the reviews. It has Winona Ryder in it, hopefully, so who cares? Maybe it will make us look forward to Halloween. If we don’t have something to look forward to we get gloomy, and if the weather is doing the same thing, it could get ugly.

Maybe this will be the year when we actually make it to Queens on a weeknight for the Haunted Hop at Knockdown Center. Check out this lineup!

Let’s try to stay positive. Soon we won’t have to panic about the election anymore, and all our stylish but dusty knitwear will come off the top shelf. Everyone’s been buying chore coats, now we’re all going to get a chance to actually wear them!

And we can spend all day tomorrow watching football! Maybe this year, someone will beat the damn Chiefs!

Try not to think about this recipe for awhile:

Provencal Tomato Tart, for Next Year

Check your phone. Is it August? Okay, no. Do you live in California, or Fiji, or on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius, or whatever else they have good fruit this time of year? Again, no. So just bookmark this and wait for eleven months.

Okay, now is it August? Great.

Go to a farmer’s market and buy tomatoes. Any kind is fine, mixing it up is even better. Get some cherries and some beefsteaks and some mutant heirlooms, some greens and yellows and reds. Listen to what the tomatoes are whispering to you, and do what they say. While you’re there get some soft herbs if you don’t have any growing in the yard. Basil is good, of course, but so are oregano and thyme. Stop by the supermarket on the way home for a box of frozen puff pastry and four ounces of goat cheese. I’m assuming you have some hard Italian cheese at home, as well as garlic and Dijon mustard, but if not then solve those problems while you’re out.

Leave the pastry box on the counter for half an hour. Make a drink, talk to the friends on the porch, then open the box. Don’t bother rolling out the pastry unless Melissa Clark is coming over later. Put one end over the other, and distractedly try to fuse the two sheets together to form a long rectangle. It doesn’t matter that much, you’re going to cut this thing into little squares when you serve it anyway.

Next: fold up the inch of pastry around the edges so you will have a nice-ish crust, and poke the remaining pastry all over with a fork. This is called docking: go watch Ina Garten or Chef John do it if what I’m saying sounds weird to you. Theirs will be prettier, but yours will be easier, and it’s August! You don’t want to be anywhere near a hot oven for a moment longer than necessary.

Pre-heat the oven to 400, and put the pan with the docked and ready pastry in for ten minutes while you get everything else ready.

In a small bowl, mix your goat cheese with two tablespoons of Dijon and a good glug of olive oil. Add a teaspoon of kosher salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and a handful of your fresh herbs, or some dried Herbes de Provence if you have any. If there aren’t any kids over you can add some red pepper flakes too, otherwise skip it and it will be fine.

Next, prep your tomatoes. The pros make a big effort to do this in an organized way, but you are trying to get back to the cornhole match outside, so just get ‘er done. To me, bite-sized is the way to go. Salt the tomatoes with a good tablespoon at least. America’s Test Kitchen recommends letting them sit salted in a colander in the sink to lose some water content before you bake them, but the goat cheese waterproofs the pastry, so it’s not that big a deal.

Pull the pre-baked pastry out of the oven. Wait a little to let it cool, the spread the cheese-mustard-herb mixture over the pastry with a spoon. Then lay out all the tomatoes over the cheese in a single layer. Grate that good hard Italian cheese over the top (or some gruyere if you wanna go full French) and some thinly-sliced garlic cloves (again, go light if there are kids around) and then pour a lot of good olive oil over the whole thing.

Put it in the over for around 40 minutes, or until the pastry is puffed, the tomatoes are just browning, and it looks tasty as hell. Slide the whole thing onto a wire rack and then carefully pull out the parchment like a magician doing a table cloth stunt. Add some more parmesan and some more herbs. Maybe some olives would be good? Serve whenever it’s convenient: it’s perfectly good at summer room temp.

Did you buy too many tomatoes? Good thinking. Make a giant caprese out of your leftovers, and serve that on the side, preferably on a picnic table.