Something else I cooked this weekend was what I’ve called Rustic Fruit Tart. This was mainly because I’d had some blueberries in the fridge for some days and thought they should be cooked. It’s rustic because it used mostly what I already had to hand and it isn’t designed to look fancy, just taste good. I used rhubarb and blueberries; you could do it with any other combination of fruits you like.
For two 8″ (20cm) tarts this is what I did …
1 packet of commercial pasty (or enough homemade pastry for two 8″/20cm flan tins)
800g fresh Rhubarb
350g fresh Blueberries
2 tbsp Sugar
half wine glass of Fruit Juice
1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C (gas mark 6); use the fan if you have one.
2. Wash and chop the rhubarb and put in a pan with the fruit juce and sugar. You want the end product to be fairly sticky so don’t add too much fruit juice.
3. Cook, with a lid on and stirring occasionally, until well cooked and the rhubarb pieces have broken down.
4. Meanwhile roll out the pastry and line the two flan tins. Prick the base of the pasty cases with a fork so they don’t bubble too much; use baking beads if you have them. Keep any pastry offcuts.
5. Blind bake the pasty cases for 15-20 minutes.
6. Remove from the oven and fill each case with the cooked rhubarb.
7. Scatter plenty of blueberries on top of the rhubarb.
8. Decorate — as badly as you like, after all this us “rustic” tart — the top of the flans using the pastry offcuts and glaze (I used milk and sugar).
9. Now bake for another 15-20 minutes until the pastry decoration is golden and the filling bubbling.
10. Remove from the oven and eat hot or allow to cool in the tins before turning out.
11. Dust with icing sugar (if such is your desire) and devour with clotted cream.
Notes
1. You can use either puff or shortcrust pastry. I used puff which didn’t work well as it puffed too much when blind baked. I’m also lazy and use commercial pastry — well I’m allowed some shortcuts!
2. Individual tartlets would work too, using exactly the same method.
3. I put a piece of baking parchment in the base of each flan tin to ensure the case didn’t stick too badly.
We’ve noticed that recently delicatessens and like establishments are proudly proclaiming availability of “hand-raised pork pies”. Although we’ve not yet definitively identified the establishment promoting this development, the 
What do you mean? Of course I cook! Bloody well, I’ll have you know! I always have done. At 12-ish (yes, that’s 50 years ago!) I kept house for my father for a week while my mother was in hospital, and he had a 3-course hot meal every evening when he came in from work. 
Thanks to Noreen, who brought this book with her when we got married, the other cookery book I use is the two volume paperback of Farmhouse Cooking by Mary Norwak and Babs Honey. No illustrations and no basics. But lots of good hearty recipes for just about anything you can imagine — as as you’ll know if you look at the recipes hereabouts we are people for good, hearty, wholesome peasant food with a minimum of faffing around. 
We always have a large pack of smoked bacon offcuts in the freezer. The local supermarket near where my mother used to live nearly always has these packs. They’re cheap and usually contain lots of half rashers and/or thick ends of bacon: brilliant bacon but not uniform and nice for supermarket packaging. Who cares?! They’re tremendous for just about anything you want bacon for: there are scraps for quiche or risotto or to use as lardons; rasher-ettes for bacon butties; and chunky bits you can chop up, fry for jumbo bacon butties, for breakfast or, well, just eating. So whenever we’re there we buy a couple of packs. 
Lovely to see.
Garibaldi. Yes, those “dead fly” biscuits. I loved them as a kid, especially the slight chewiness of the fruit.