Irene has been making this tart for family gatherings for decades. The recipe comes from Gourmet January 1996, making it over 30 years old. In recent years, I’ve started making it for both family and friends. It never fails to please, and is a hit for vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike.

Just take a look at that crust and you’ll understand why.

Thought it was about time I shared the recipe here.

Wissahickon
 
I am all that surrounds me.
I am the white veiled heavens above, glowing in the morning light.
I am the shimmering schist below,
slabs of bedrock layered beneath clear rushing waters
bathing trout, frog, salamander,
inexorably carving this deep gorge ‘tween evergreen hills,
the roar of the falls blending with birdsong, woodpecker and distant traffic,
welcoming me home.
 
Margaret Polaneczky
March 25, 2026
 
Wissahickon schist is a sparkly, foliated metamorphic rock dominant in the Philadelphia region, specifically in the Wissackon Gorge.

So there it was, the last week of December and I had a whole giant mason jar of cranberry sauce in the fridge, ostensibly leftover from Christmas dinner. The truth is, I had made it on Christmas Eve, but in the hubbub of Christmas Day and all the other things I was bringing to dinner, I actually forgot to bring it !

Now I love cranberry sauce, but there’s no way my husband and I were going to make our way through that jar before next Christmas.

Fortunately, a solution presented itself when our friends in the neighborhood invited us over last minute for dinner and bridge and requested we bring an appetizer. I recalled these wonderful puff pastry brie bites my sis served at Thanksgiving, though hers were made with jelly of some kind. Why not make something similar with cranberry sauce?

I devised a recipe inspired by a few I found online, went out and got a box of puff pastry and got to work, only to realize I had no idea how to make the shells using the puff pastry. I called my sister for advice. “Are you kidding me?” she laughed. “I used pre-made shells!”

Sure enough, Athens Foods makes perfect little puff pastry shells, but not every store carries them. It was 3 pm and dinner was at 6, and I didn’t want to run around trying to find the shells, which I already knew my local Whole Foods did not have. Enter InstaCart. A quick search online found one store in the area that had the shells in stock, and they were dropped off at my door by 4:30! (I think I tipped the delivery guy more than those puff pastry cups actually cost, I was so grateful…)

These little babies were a real hit with our friends, a wonderfully light and delicious appetizer. The addition of mandarin orange segments to the serving plate makes a colorful presentation and are a wonderful accompaniment to the bites.

The dinner as usual was fabulous – our friends are great cooks. Then we played girls against boys for bridge, and the girls won!

One of the best things about retirement is getting to eat lunch at my own table.

During my working years and most of my adult life, unlike your work-from-home types, I either packed or ordered in lunch. Wait – Who am I kidding? I rarely packed my lunch. Mornings are hard enough, thank you very much. It was all I could do to stop for a coffee and egg sandwich on the way to work. No way I was packing lunch! If I was feeling industrious, I picked up a yogurt while I was at the deli. Otherwise and more often than not, when a break in the action at the office or hospital occurred, I ordered in, or grabbed a sandwich or a slice of pizza at a meeting. I rarely gave the midday meal much thought or attention – it was just a necessary waste of my time.

Now that I’m no longer punching the clock, lunch has become a really joyful mid afternoon repast. And much healthier, with smaller portions than I used to have. It’s amazing really – when the environment is peaceful and pleasant, and you aren’t being interrupted or trying to return patient phone calls between bites, what you eat is much more satisfying and you need less of it. And of course, if your lunch is a sandwich that happens to be made on homemade whole grain sourdough, a half sandwich is more than enough. Add a glass of kombucha and an apple, and you’re good for the rest of the afternoon.

Today’s lunch was leftover leek and white bean soup from last night’s dinner. This soup was inspired by a wonderfully light ham and white bean soup my sister Ronnie served at the last Eagles game watch at her house (Go Birds!). That soup made me realize that bean soup does not need to be thick or even creamy in order to satisfy. This soup is light and lovely, and with a slice of sourdough, it’s a dream of a lunch !

Well, hello there! It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Life for this retired doc has turned out to be very busy – so much for my worries about being bored. I turn around and find it’s been 6 months since I’ve posted on the blog! But this cake and this recipe have me itching to share, and make for a perfect re-entry post.

It all started when I told my writing group about our local fishmonger, who each week, along with the menu of offerings at the truck, sends out a poem!

That led our group leader to remind us of that great theater classic Cyrano de Bergerac –

The poet-fishmonger begs a memory from Act II of the great theater classic Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) by Edmond Rostand. In it Rostand gives us the delightful character of Ragueneau, a pastry-chef-poet. In addition to writing his own poems, Ragueneau offers free pastry to poets who give him a written poem. But Ragueneau’s frugal wife uses those pages of poetry to wrap the pastries they sell! When the morning crowd of hungry poets demand a poem from the master himself, Ragueneau offer up one of the most quoted recipes in verse [as translated from the original French]:

“Beat your eggs, the yolk and white, very light;
Mingle with their creamy fluff milk of almonds, just enough.
Dainty pattie-pans embraced in puff paste.
Have these ready in reach to fill each.
So into these, a score or more, slowly pour your custard so.
And there you go!
Almond tartlets Ragauneau!”

To which I replied –

I need to start writing my recipes in verse.

and the challenge was on!

It took about two seconds to find the right candidate for a poem – My mother-on-law Irene’s recipe for summer fruit cake. It’s my go-to summer pot luck/dinner party dessert, and can be made using any summer fruit – usually I use a pint of blueberries.

But Irene always made it using small Italian plums, a bag of which which my daughter happened to bring with her to our cottage over Labor Day weekend. Well, I tell you (and my husband and family concur), the plum version is even better than the blueberry version of this delicious cake. It’s made all the more special by the fact that good Italian plums are a rare find off-season, which means that the plum cake is an ephemeral treat whose enjoyment is limited to late summer.

So, before it gets too late, I urge you to seek out some small Italian plums, and try this recipe, as did one of my writing group members, who shared the cake with friends old and new. I was so touched that she made it, and love thinking of it gracing the table over which tea and conversation and community were shared.

Late Summer Plum Cake

As summer days shorten and September comes,
rinse 10 ripe small Italian plums.
Pat them dry, then slice in two
along their length – use all your strength,
the pit can be a challenge to remove.
Then set aside, you’ve got lots more to do!

Fahrenheit 375 – preheat your oven now.
Gather your ingredients. I hope that you know how
to separate 3 eggs, then beat the whites alone
till stiff and fluffy. (My, my how they have grown!)

Cream 6 ounces butter at room temperature
with sugar (a cup and a half),
till light yellow in color and when you are sure,
then one-at-a-time,
(stalling now for a rhyme)
beat in three egg yolks for a laugh.

Mix 1 tsp vanilla with 3 tbsp rum
and add to the butter mix.
Then the grated peel of a large yellow lemon
will add a citric kick.

In a separate bowl, whisk 2 cups of flour
with 1/2 tsp baking soda and a 1/4 tsp salt.
Then add in to the butter mix, but lower the power,
beat just till incorporated,
lest gluten be formulated
and a tough crumb will be your fault!

Now fold in those egg whites
(hopefully they’re still stiff).
Use a big rubber spatula,
as the batter is thick
and the bowl may seem heavy,
but don’t be a coward,
pour the batter into a pan that you’ve buttered and floured.
(A 9×13 inch pan is the best size to use,)
and now comes the fun part – top it off with the fruit!

Place each little plum-half face down on the batter
in a 5 by 4 grid, so they look straight and nice.
No need to press hard, as it just doesn’t matter.
They’ll sink while it’s baking, one plum to a slice!

Sprinkle 1/4 cup thinly sliced almonds atop
the plums, then into the oven she goes
for a half hour or so, 35 minutes tops,
Till a tester comes out clean
(you know what I mean)
and the cake lightly browned – then stop!

Let your plum cake cool on a rack completely
Then dust with confectioner’s sugar using a sieve
Be generous with the sugar, but please do it neatly
and don’t make a mess. (If you do, I’ll forgive.)

Cut into pieces
and share with your friends.
They will all sing your praises
and come back for seconds!

---

More on Italian Plums

• Food52 – Should you fall for the final stone fruit of summer?
• Savoring Italy – Italian Plum Jam
• Smitten Kitchen pays homage to Marian Burros’s quintessential Italian Plum Torte
• Dorie Greenspan makes her Plum Torte spicy, using Chinese 5 spice, ginger and cinnamon

Closing up the cottage always brings a bittersweet sadness as we say goodbye to the mountain in the midst of glorious autumn colors, but that sadness is made better by our dear friends Andy and Linda, who have made coming for cottage closing a new annual tradition. Their joyful presence helps us to see the autumn beauty and dwell on the present day, not the winter to come. A hike on the rail trail helped.

They also stayed to help us clean out and pack up the house. Linda is the queen of getting a lot of stuff into small spaces, and I’m telling you she was amazing! We got the four of us and all the food and provisions into the car for the ride home with plenty of room to spare.

My starter has been wallowing in the fridge since we returned, unfed for two full weeks. But all it took was 24 hours and two feedings and she’s a maniac!

I used her to make a levain for a spelt-wheat boule inspired by a recipe in Tartine No 3. I did not have the exact flours Chad Robertson uses, but I did have some Palouse white wheat, some wonderful One Degree Sprouted whole wheat (currently my fave flour), and exactly 200 grams of spelt from Arrowhead Mills. I adjusted the recipe and ended up with a slightly over-proofed (left it in the fridge for almost 24 hours) but delicious loaf.

I’m not sharing the recipe because it was a makeshift attempt at cleaning out some small amounts of flour, and unlikely to ever be replicated again.

It wasn’t my best loaf, nor was it a bad loaf. It was today’s loaf. Not perfect, nothing amazing. Just delicious, fresh and lovely.

Let’s make every day that way.

American Pipe Dream

“Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own”
– John Prine, 1971

As Steve Bannon tells us
They’re “flooding the zone with shit” –
Sowing the seeds of chaos,
Till we can’t keep up with it.

Distracting the population
With outrageous tweets and lies
On continuous rotation
Like so many gnats and flies

Demanding our attention,
In hopes we fail to see
The destruction they are sowing
in our democracy.

Eventually, we’ll tire –
It’s too much to comprehend.
So we go offline, turn off the news
And pray it soon will end.

“Life’s too short”, we say, “to spend my days
In anger and in fear
I’m exhausted in so many ways
I’m just gonna’ leave it here.”

You’re right to think you can’t go on
Without a break – so take it
It’s a relay, not a marathon
Together we can make it.

Be sure to come back when you can
We need you in this fight
We may not have a perfect plan
But we know what’s wrong from right.

– Margaret Polaneczky, 2/26/25

Has Anyone Told Him?

Projection (noun)
– a mental image viewed as reality
– the unconscious transfer of one’s own desires or emotions to another person.

The Mercator projection,
the most frequently used 2D map of the world, 
has a slight imperfection 
when the globe is unfurled.

Land masses near the poles of our sphere
are not as large as they appear.
Thus, Europe, Russia and North America,
being at northern latitudes, in the Mercator,
seem to be larger than the continent Africa, 
which straddles the Equator. 
(Which is why the Mercator projection 
is criticized as being a Euro-centric convention.)

Antarctica and Greenland,
being even closer to earth’s ends
are the planet’s most area-distorted masses of land,
which can be hard to comprehend. 

When you Google “Greenland” on your laptop or phone, 
Greenland is as “massive” as it can be
larger than the United States 
and about the same size 
as the entire continent of Africa.
But would you be surprised,
or did you already know 
that on a globe (the truest view)
its area matches that of Congo, 
and Greenland can fit into America over four times (amazing but true).

There is no globe in the Oval Office
and no maps hang upon its walls,
and the White House Map room 
is now used as a reception hall. 
So a reasonable assumption might be had  
that the President who won our recent election
just might use Google maps on his phone or Ipad
to view the world in the Mercator Projection.

Which begs the question – 
Has anyone told him? 

We had a little family vacation in Los Angeles over a long weekend in early summer. In part 1, I told you where we stayed and what we did. But of course, this being a food blog, I know you’re wondering and I need to tell you –

What we ate

We’re not into fancy restaurants, but insist on great food. In addition to the restaurants below, we hosted a backyard potluck barbecue for my daughter’s friends, one of whom is a chef, so you know the food was delicious. We had hamburgers, chilled gazpacho, salads, amazing desserts, beer and a signature lime-gin mule.

And of course, for breakfasts, I made bagels.

Here’s where we ate out.

My 2 ¢

This gem serves light, delicious, healthy soul food in a small, casual location in a strip mall on West Pico Blvd. After 10 years in the same location, James Beard nominated chef Alisa Reynolds is finally becoming nationally known, not just for her take on Southern cooking amazing food, but for the travel – documentary series she hosts on Hulu called Searching for Soul.

The shrimp and grits, enlightened with a lobster broth, was the best I’ve eaten. The oxtail tacos were phenomenal,

as was the catfish and the red beans with black rice.

We left feeling satiated but light, and knew we had eaten food that was good both for our body and for our soul.

Pizzeria Mozza

I was determined to eat at a restaurant run by Nancy Silverton, James Beard Awarded Outstanding Chef awardee, who was at the vanguard of the sourdough artisan bread revolution in the 80’s. The only table at a Silverton establishment we could get was at Pizzeria Mozza, not infrequently said to be one of the best pizzerias in the country. This pizza lover concurs – you must try the Croque Madame pizza.

They also make a mean calamari, served with a light tomato sauce with lemon rind shavings. We loved it so much we forgot to take a pic till it was nearly gone…

Gjelina LA

I should have realized that I’d love this place – It’s owned by the same folks who run Gjusta Bakery, one of my very favorite places to eat in LA, focusing on locally-sourced and vegetable-forward cuisine. They also do a mean pizza and charcuterie. I loved the atmosphere, with unfinished plywood walls, flowers, open windows and a free standing shower in the bathroom!

The grilled Oyster Mushrooms w/ tarragon butter were a main course unto themselves.

The Nettle Buccatini Cacio e Pepe was flawless.

The grilled broccolini was served in a black garlic vinaigrette and garnished with gomashio, a Japanese sesame seed-salt condiment. (Sorry for messy presentation, we had already started serving ourselves before I took the pic)

The scallops were served in a delicious light broth with fennel that just begged for some bread to soak it up, which of course we did!

Gjelina is everything you think of when you think of LA food – light, healthy, vegetable forward, inventive.

Sanamluang Cafe Hollywood

In a strip mall in the heart of Thai Town is Sanamluang Cafe, a casual place serving delicious, authentic Thai food. Sanamluang has been noted by the Latimes to be that rare restaurant that keeps late hours (open till 1:45 am) without sacrificing quality for convenience. We had a delicious curry, pad see ew and salad. (Sorry, no pics.)

And that’s it for our visit to Los Angeles

There are so many sites left to see, so much to do. I’m going to be sure I plan my next visit to coincide with the Rose Bowl Flea Market, which I think is my favorite place in Los Angeles.

But the best part was being together in the same place at the same time with both our daughters, meeting my daughter’s wonderful friends and getting to share in her beautiful life in LaLa Land.

Earlier this summer, we took a long overdue family vacation to visit my younger daughter in Los Angeles. We had not been to LaLa Land since December 2020, when our trip was abruptly cut short by a Covid infection among our ranks. Luckily, this visit, though short, was infection-free, and though our son-in-law was unable to join us, a wonderful time was had by all. Here’s what we did –

Where we stayed

The best VRBO – A 3 bedroom, 2 bath home in Venice Beach, complete with piano, amazing CD collection, cook’s kitchen and a pool! Our hosts were warm, welcoming and just the best. If you’re interested, contact me for details.

What We Did

Aside from hanging at the VRBO, cooking, talking, laughing, reading, listening to music, and hosting a barbecue, we did quite a bit !

The thing about visiting a city to see friends or family is that you get to experience life as a local, and not a tourist. So we did the things our daughter does, and visited the places she loves. Plus a thing or two we discovered on our own the day we dropped her off at work.

We played tennis in Griffith Park

Hands down, my favorite activity outside the house. We met up with a friend of my daughter’s who is graciously teaching her to play tennis, and spend the morning hitting balls in Vermont Canyon, one of the loveliest tennis settings I’ve ever seen. It was hard to pull my eyes off those hills and blue sky to focus on the ball. Parking was easy, prices cheap, bathrooms and water nearby. What a wonderful urban oasis!

We Visited the Original Farmer’s Market

At 3rd and Fairfax, this landmark open-air marketplace has been around since 1934. It’s no substitute for LA’s real farmers markets, but a fun conglomeration of food vendors similar to Philly’s Reading Terminal Market or Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Shop for fish, meats or cheese,

pick out a hot sauce,

try a flight of pickles,

and enjoy some great people watching.

My favorite store there is Monsieur Marcel, a French Gourmet market and bistro.

I adore all things French. It was hard to contain myself around the Jean Dubost Laguiole cutlery

and french linens,

but I did. However, there was no such restraint at the cheese counter, where we picked up appetizers for our backyard barbecue.

Schindler House

While my younger daughter was working, we visited two architectural sites. Not that we planned it that way, but serendipitously these two turned out to be a great pair of sites to visit, both having been either designed or influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, and within easy driving distance of one another. When you add in the Farmers Market breakfast and a soul food lunch, it was a pretty perfect Los Angeles day.

The Schindler House is hidden on Kings Road in West Hollywood in a very residential area – look for signs for MAK Center for Art and Architecture, a Vienna-based museum that runs the site. Designed and built in 1922 by Rudolph M Schindler, an Austrian-born protege of Frank Lloyd Wright, the home was a mini-commune designed to house Schindler, his wife Pauline, and their friends, Clyde and Marion Chace.

Each individual had their own studio space, they shared the kitchen, gardens and patios, and each couple had a sleeping porch on the roof. (You can see an open porch up there on the roof.) The house was one of the first built in the Modernist Style, on a concrete slab with tilt up concrete slab walls, and incorporates Japanese elements, such as sliding screens, throughout.

Like Wright, Schindler built much of the furniture in the house. Though at present the home is mostly empty, photos of the place in its prime reveal it to have been a warm, welcoming and beautiful space.

We were invited to tag along with a UCLA MFA class tour, and learned a lot from the docent and teacher. (Made me want to go back to school…)

I found myself fascinated with the history of the house and the couples who lived there. Like all Utopian experiments, this one did not last long in its original iteration, though the home remained communal as friends and family came and went over the years. Seems like fodder for a great mini-series…

Hollyhock House

Hollyhock House, built between 1919-21 by Frank Lloyd Wright for oil-heiress, single mom and feminist Aline Barnsdall as part of a planned 26-acre arts complex, was Wright’s first Los Angeles commission and astonishingly, never completed. The building of the house was actually overseen by Schindler and by Wright’s son, as Wright was occupied in Japan at the time. There were massive cost overruns, and the house, like other Wright structures, looked great but functioned poorly. Barnsdall apparently never liked the house, ultimately donating the home and surrounding acreage to the city of Los Angeles in 1927.

Today the home is the centerpiece of a sprawling complex comprised of a museum and community art space atop a beautiful hilltop with views of Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood sign.

My favorite part of the house is the water feature that never worked – an outdoor fountain flowing into the living room in front of the fireplace!

The kitchen was classic Wright, and I loved it.

I wish we could have joined a docent tour, as I suspect there are more stories to hear about the commission, but that will be for another time.

We went to the beach

No visit to LA is complete without a visit to the Pacific Ocean, which we accessed at Will Rogers State Beach, just north of Santa Monica. Despite it being a holiday weekend, we easily found parking and a prime spot away from the crowds, but not so far that we couldn’t access the facilities, which were quite nice, and included varied and what looked like delicious food options. The winds were quiet enough that the girls played a game of Spite and Malice on the blanket, and then we all napped in the late afternoon sun.

Stay tuned for Part 2 …