Baking With Dorie: Harvest Tomato-Cheese Tartlets
It took me three years to admit it, but the rather large patch in my garden that we created specifically for tomatoes was dug in the wrong place! The plants just don't get enough sun, which explains why I'm harvesting the first truly ripe tomatoes now, at the end of September.
The tomatoes were awfully slow to turn red—so slow that most of them were eaten by the chipmunks, raccoons, deer and moles, who get to spend more time in the garden than I do—but, on a good day, that made them seem so much more precious. To celebrate our first harvest, we ate sliced tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner (I even had a tomato sandwich one day) and I made these pretty tomato tartlets as a starter for an outdoor dinner.
The tartlets are built on a base of puff pastry (homemade or storebought), which is baked between two cookie sheets in order to keep it from doing what it was created to do—puff. I know, I know, it's an act against the pastry's nature, but what you get is perfect: a layer of pastry that is shatter-at-a-touch flaky, but flat enough to serve as a palette for a pile of delicious ingredients.
