Rustic plum tart

I didn't use a real recipe for this. I poked around online a bit to see if I had enough plums (I guesstimated that I had about 2 pounds), and the internet seemed to agree -- two pounds was plenty.

I used my mom's foolproof recipe for pie crust. I was almost out of white flour, so I replaced just about 2/3 of the flour with whole wheat. I like the flavor of whole wheat anyway. I rolled it out into about a 14" circle. Then I sliced up the plums, laid them in sort of concentric rings, hid the ugly slices at the edge, and folded the outside edge over.

The best plum tart I ever had was at a local restaurant about ten years ago, and it benefitted from just tasting like fresh plums -- there wasn't a bunch of nutmeg or something, and not much sugar, either. In fact, it was almost mouth-puckeringly tart. I modeled mine after that one.

I didn't add any seasonings, no flour in the plums to thicken them up, no apricot glaze... I toyed with not adding anything at all, but at the last minute, I sprinkled about half a tablespoon of sugar over the top of the plums

I baked it at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes.

Okay, so here's the deal. It wasn't bad. But it wasn't what I wanted, either. The whole wheat was a little overwhelming both texturally and flavor-wise. The recipes I'd seen all said one to two pounds of plums was plenty, but I really wanted a higher plum-to-crust ratio. And finally, I used the wrong kind of plums. I used whatever kind came from my CSA this week, and they happened to be quite sweet, whereas some varieties of plum are very tart. I needed the tartness in this dish.

So it was fine, it was okay, it wasn't bad*. But I would do a lot of things differently next time.

*My two-year-old begs to differ. She said "Yuck! I don't like it. It's bad. I don't want any more. Take it away. Did you give me a treat? Why was it yucky?"