is it summer?

It must be - it's a regular strawberry-o-rama around here. This is a Lemon-Curd Strawberry Tart, a recipe I've been making since high school. I made a few errors here. I doubled the lemon curd and used sliced strawberries, rather than cutting the stems off and standing the whole strawberries up on the base of the tart shell. As a result, once cut into, this oozed everywhere. Though well received at our picnic/bbq (we resorted to dipping extra strawberries someone had brought in the pooling lemon curd, I'd do it differently next time.

Why did I make these errors? Normally I make tartlets, in which case the extra lemon curd and sliced strawberries are entirely recommended, in my opinion.

The tart shell is the recipe in Marcus Samuelsson's Akvavit and the New Scandinavian Cuisine. I made the sweet version, but forgot to include the sugar, so it wasn't exactly sweet. I did add a good dose of dried lavender buds (which were crushed into flecks in the food processor) and the tiniest dusting of cinnamon to play up the spicey notes in the lavender. That choice, at least, was a good one, and a way for me to play on/allude to my favorite lemon-lavendar sugar cookies in a dessert that was not about lemon lavender sugar cookies.

I was impressed when some of Cassidy's coworkers, who've had the lemon lavendar cookies before, got the allusion. I think each cook has his or her own flavour vocabulary, don't you? Just as writers have certain turns of phrase and actors certain cadences they use - it's a voice, that's what it is, a palette. I think there's something particularly intimate about learning another individual's cooking/eating palette, don't you? It takes time and careful consideration, and I don't think that we're necessarily a culture of flavour signatures, so it's a special effort.

alright, now I'm just rambling. Try the tart. Or at least make up the curd and put it on pound cake, fresh crumpets, shortcake, over berries - anything, really. It's not terribly good for you, but it is terribly good.