Tart for Friends

20th May 2011 Friday

6 pm

The beds are made up, vases of lavender and flowering nutmeg placed in their rooms, the stairs are hoovered (thank you, lovely husband), the loos are clean, the wine is chilling in the fridge and the sun is slanting in on the table so you can’t tell the fat razor shell candle is lit. Waiting for our dear London friends to arrive.

I’m rolling out a slab of puff pastry ( Jusrol all butter puff - the best) and I realise I haven’t cooked enough filling - roasted butternut squash, red onion and garlic. It looks patchy and mean when I spread it over the smeared mustard on the pastry, so I slice up four big tomatoes, poach another bunch of asparagus and pile them all on over the layer of Gruyere cheese and finish with gratings of parmesan. Now it feels like the main course and not a pre-drinks nibble.

My husband brings them home from the station, hot and sticky from their London days and we sit in the windy garden in late sunshine while the tart browns in oven. And we begin to dip into the couldron of our lives which have bubbled and overflowed together for the last nearly thirty years.