October 24, 2025

I Like My Tarts How I Like My Blogs: Rough and Thick

I came into an abundance of onions over the weekend. Large beads bathed in balsamic vinegar - a little bit sweet, tangy, crunchy, pearlescent pompoms prêt à manger. But I couldn’t just eat them. Firstly, I had already had quite a few, and secondly, I had a vision. An autumnal, caramelised, sort of vision.

I am still struggling with my lack of small cast iron pan. The ideal (to match my vision) would have been to slice these onions in half, place them cut side down in a spiral -`onto a pan, let them get hot and sticky, then add splashes of the balsamic pickling juice to release them from the pan until such a time as I deemed appropriate, then a layer of store bought pastry (the cheapest ones - and the majority of the Jus-Rol ones I’ve encountered are vegan) blanketed on top, a tiny poke hole so the onions don’t suffocate, and and then into the oven until the wine I’ve been sipping needs a refill and I remember to check the oven and voilà, the pastry’s golden brown and I turn the whole thing onto a plate and a delicious spiral of treacle-dark rosettes hypnotise me and make me believe that we’re in living in the best of all possible worlds.

But we’re not. We’re really not.

And I don’t have a flat-bottomed shallow cast iron pan that fits into my oven. So. I reconfigured my dreams and delved into my little books.

Delia had a recipe for a thick¹ onion tart (because of course she did) and no matter the likely looking books I flicked through, hers was the most that aligned with a possibility of what I could easily make. Though it seemed more like a quiche and no eggs = no quickies here. And there was no accounting for these deli-type balsamic onions either.

We know why we’re here - for all my ramblings Sohla must appear. And she does. But strangely she does not have a recipe for Tarte Tatin From Three Pots of Balsamic Onions You’ve Been Given (at least not in Start Here) BUT she did have a recipe for a Rough Puff Pastry, and my hands were itchy to make a thing. So I made it.

It’s been hard to get my head together to make Start Here recipes. I know I love making them. I know I love cooking in general. I also like taking pics and I enjoy writing up the process. But.

Food cost money. New recipes means new ingredients (frequently) and new situations which they will fit into. New recipes that need photographs and writing take time. I have made some things without either pics or writing, but that’s not the biggest barrier. I’m not making all these recipes “behind your back” as it were, feasting and just not posting, which I would fully do, because this blog is a personal exercise and I feel none of the pressure of posting, because nothing and nobody is depending on this. Even me. The blog actually encourages me to make the recipes way more than not having it. I know I would have admired and not really used this book and I am doing if I hadn’t placed the arbitrary ‘Julie and Julia’ task on myself.

The barrier is money.

Money to to buy the ingredients, yes, but money to not just use the ingredients² in the cupboard. And the money of free time. I’ve been busy, learning new skills, putting them into practise, and trying to balance out each day and week so that I don’t burn out again. Life is hard. Rice is hard. Sometimes it’s night.

So, yeah, money. And I have some coming in now dribble dribble and the world is still horrific in so many ways, but I’ve got a little bit of a handle on my own day-to-day, and that’s so super, and even though Sohla didn’t have everything I wanted, I was willing to have a go at what she did have accessible to me. And that was a rough puff.

She is very exact with her instructions around this pastry. Temperature of ingredients vs room, type of butter, sizing of said butter, what everything should look like at each stage, how you weren’t to change the batch size. Every few steps she gives you reflection questions

“Are there still large sheets of naked³ butter and/or the dough isn’t holding together?”

and what to do with that information.

“Repeat the earlier process of rolling and folding the dough, then reevaluate.”

I like this. I like entering an environment where the rules are clear, and the consequences are clear, so there’s no blame or guilt for not following the rules, it’s just dealing with the consequences of that lack of evaluation or process following. I do think⁴ that usually a recipe will have a: ‘this is what it should look like at this stage’ moment, but with out the ‘if it looks like this, do this’, which means for some people, they’ll feel the need to start again (money, wasted ingredients, time), or for me, I’ll keep going regardless and end up with a less than ideal end product (or a delightful end product, so I stop paying attention to the advice).

Sohla had enough there for me to latch on, and for me to acknowledge that I might not nail it because I’ve not stuck to all the guidelines. I was using vegan butter, for one, and I wasn’t sure of the fat content (though I treated it like European butter). There was a stage where my dough was probably too warm (because of the smeariness of my butter, thank you Reflection Sohla), but as I was using a cold block of vegan butter plus spreadable butter (to make up the advised amount), I figured it wasn’t going to get much more solid than at present and I powered through. Butt here was no guilt or mystery, just, yeah, it might not work out so good.

Only. It did. Man, it was fricking great. AND sexy. Rough and thick in all the right places.

I managed (for I think the first time EVER???) to bake a free standing tart. Rigid sides, no leaking. A gooey but solid centre. Crispy flaky edges, with the wiggles on the sides!?! Man. The power I felt.⁵

Not all of that was the pastry. And not all of the pastry was fully cooked (I didn’t blind bake, I rarely blind bake, I don’t have a ‘dicky tummy’ from it, but I will look to learn about doing so next time. Or leave it in the oven longer). I also had the delicious onions, and a vegan cheese ⁶ that doesn’t overwhelm, a vegan milk⁷ that gives creaminess and vegan egg-replacer⁸ that doesn’t curse your baked goods with sulfurous gases. Oh, and a vegan butter⁹ that acts like a European butter, I suppose.

And I had money. To buy the butter (the only new ingredient), to use ingredients I had at home (rather than having then only for specifically planned meals) and to spend a couple of hours just pottering about, allowing for things to go wrong, for pastry to have to go back in the fridge, for dinner to be at eight, not seven, to not have to get onto something else, or be somewhere else, or learn something else. It’s nice to have some money.

It’s also nice to have that little bit of pressure. For me, it was the onions. I had too many to ignore, and too little time for them to be a useful addition to my culinary adventure. And I had this blog. To encourage me to have a look through Start Here and pick something I felt up for. Not something perfect, just like this blog, in its eternal first-draft state, will never be something perfect. It’s always happiest being something a bit rough.¹⁰