Quote de jour
"The rewards for those who persevere far exceed the pain that must precede the victory."
                                                                                                                               ~Ted W. Engstrom

I woke up in my warm, cozy bed on Thanksgiving morning, filled with gratitude. It was less easy to feel gratitude in a warm, wet bed. I sat bolt upright and patted the soggy mattress. I must be part reptilian because I crave constant warmth.I like reading with a hot water bottle before going to bed. During the night, the entire contents seeped through the duvet,top sheet, bottom sheet, mattress pad and pillow top mattress. I lugged the mountain of linen to the dryer, grateful it wasn't pee or worse, a potential new customer for Depends.
Then, my heart groaned. I remembered the previous day's exercise in hair pulling AKA baking a tarte Tatin.

The plan was to make the butter pastry, prepare the fruit and bake the tarte the following day, Thanksgiving. I'm a great cook but a less than great baker because I refuse to follow recipe directions. All my cooking is done by intuition. I take a recipe as a starting point and improvise like some mad, jazz pianist. More times than not, I'm lucky and the alchemy works, but not his time. A tarte Tatin is essentially an upside down,caramelized apple tart made famous by theTatin family in 1880's France.

I decided to make it with apples and pears, and instead of coring and quartering the fruit, I sliced it with visions of creating layered spirals. I knew when the sugar refused to caramelize properly something was wrong. Normally, it's so easy to transform granular sugar to a sweet caramelized amber liquid. The timing can be tricky. If you wait too long, the amber turns brown and all the sweetness is gone. Undeterred, I added the fruit to the still sandy sugar. The liquid in  the fruit blends with the sugar and creates a syrup. There seemed like a ridiculous amount of liquid and it needed to be reduced to half. Impatient, I made my fatal error. I left the room. By the time I ran back, it was too late. A thick layer of burned, unsweet, caramelized fruit greeted me. All feelings of gratitude disappeared.
 
I asked myself out loud, "What would Gordon Ramsay do?" I'd enjoyed one of the best meals of my life at his restaurant at Claridge's in London. Chef Ramsay is notorious for his prefectionism and a foul tongue. I guessed, he'd chuck the burned mess out while spewing a barrage of unprintable words. That's not my style.
"What would Martha Stewart do?" I know she doesn't like wasting food and neither do I. She'd make lemonade out of lemons.She'd improvise, and that's what I did. I scraped the edible fruit into a bowl, caramelized another batch of sugar, added it to the fruit for sweetness and called it a day. The super-caramelized fruit with freshly ground cardamom tasted better than expected. I planned to bake a custard pie and add the fruit as a topping.

On Thanksgiving morning, I decided to bake the pastry in my favorite Villeroy & Boch quiche/tart pan. It was a wedding present from my first marriage and I loved the whimsical Noah's ark design. The pastry looked perfect and baked fine. I'd covered the edges with aluminum foil to prevent over darkening. All was well. I made a lovely, improvised coconut custard and was about to pour it inside the pan and complete the baking, when I realized the ceramic pan had cracked in two. Gratitude, where are you? The partially baked
pastry was hot and as fragile as crumbling, Ancient Eygptian pottery. It broke into pieces, but I managed to re-assemble the wonky creation in the first pie pan I could find.  I poured in the custard and quickly realized I'd chosen one with a perforated bottom. The custard oozed out in a messy pool. With not a moment to spare, I made a make shift foil bottom and popped it in the oven.


Kitchen Armageddon with Noah's ark cracked in two.

After non-stop disasters I watched with trepidation as the wonky, custard pie cooked to golden imperfection.


Layla's new invention. The apple pear tarte Tatin coconut custard pie.  Sorry, I have no recipe.
The scene of the crime.

I was immensely grateful to be spared cooking Thanksgiving dinner.


My 'eyes are bigger than my stomach' plate. I didn't eat everything seen here but I did have appetizers, soup and a sampling of  five pies washed down with a lovely reisling. My pie was good but even better this morning for breakfast. I'd arrived home with enough left overs to feed a family in Somalia for a month. Why is it that Thanksgiving food always seems to taste better the next day? The gratitude attitude continues...