Art And The Tart

13th May 2012 Sunday

We are sitting in the narrow courtyard of a cafe in Ashburton waiting for our food. I’m regretting it - wishing we had left the minute I saw the ashtray - a scallop shell -  overflowing with cigarette butts on the table next to ours. Sweet wrappers and more cigarette butts litter the ground.The flowering shrub overhanging our chairs is humming with wasps. I start reading a Sunday colour supplement magazine to take my mind off it. My husband lays down the Observer after glancing at the front page, sits back and turns his face to the sun. It feels unfair to read when he can’t. Something we don’t do together any more.

Later we wander around open barns and another courtyard - clean, bright and cared for and full of wonderful paintings, photographs, and quirky clay models - part of the Devon Six Days of Art Exhibition. My husband is enthusiastic, he talks to the artists, tells them how impressed he is - again and again. He’s inspired by the paintings of clouds. Today I am overwhelmed by his exuberance - wanting to distance myself, wanting just to look and absorb and wonder and not comment. Then I catch myself wanting it to be different from the way it is....take a breath and try again....

To blot out the memory of our horrible lunch this is the tart I make for supper  :

Roll out a sheet of puff pasty as thin as you dare. Smear the base with a black olive, garlic and parsley pesto, slather on a layer of long and slow fried onions, scatter a mixture of asparagus tips, their chopped stems and fine sliced courgettes over the top and finish with crumbled feta cheese, Parmesan shavings and some drizzles of a fruity olive oil. Bake till the pastry is buttery crisp,the asparagus is tender and the cheese is molten gold.

We eat it in front of the TV watching Glenn Close being the wicked red-lipsticked Cruella de Vil in A Hundred and One Dalmations. Or as my husband reads it as One O One Dalmations. And asks me who Disney is.  But he really likes the tart - especially as he grew all the asparagus spears himself.