Cherry Cheese Tart

Yesterday I bought some Okanagan cherries, just for eating. Sadly, they turned out to be dry and flavourless—but the story ends happily. In a tart. I’m not sure why, but a lot of the cherries this year have been a disappointment. I bought them on maybe 7 occasions. Of those, only 2 batches were really everything that cherries should be.

So I thought that these late varieties, ripe so late in August and having had the benefit of more sun, might be better than those I had in mid-July. But no. If anything, they were worse. The others had lacked flavour but were juicy; these had neither flavour nor much juice. (What happened to our poor cherries this year?)

There was little point eating them plain, so I snooped around in the fridge and found a few things that would help them along:

• some frozen puff pastry*
• a bit of leftover chevre (goat cheese)
• a few slivered almonds
• some yummy homemade cherry jam (made from about 5 lbs of the good cherries I found a month ago)

First, let me say how impressed I am with the President’s Choice* puff pastry. (By the way, I very much doubt that I will ever make my own puff.) It’s made at least in part with real butter (unfortunately also canola and palm oils, but the butter is listed first), and it’s pre-rolled so you don’t have to roll it out. A box contains 2 sheets, and they’re rolled up in a sheet of parchment that you can use to line your baking sheet. Brilliant—I really appreciate the reduced waste.

So, I unrolled a sheet of the puff, with its parchment, placed both on a baking sheet, and pricked the surface lightly with a fork. I turned on the oven to 375 F and put the goat cheese in a small dish, in the oven, to soften as the oven heated. Then I spread about 2 Tbsp of the cheese thinly over the pastry.

In a saucepan, I heated about 4 Tbsp of jam with 2 Tbsp of water to thin it down. Then I added about a cup of the ho-hum cherries, pitted and halved. This I cooked over very low heat for about 20 minutes, or until the fresh cherries had softened.

I spread the jammy cherries over the cheese and sprinkled with about 2 Tbsp of slivered almonds. Popped the pastry into the oven for about 20 minutes, or until the edges were beautifully golden and the whole thing was puffing up.

Cooled it, sliced it, and yum. Cherries redeemed.

Debbra Mikaelsen