It was a Saturday. I had just met a deadline that I had been dreading. I was immensely relieved. Two of our best friends were in town for a visit, two friends who moved here a couple of years ago and became sort of like family, but then they found jobs and gigs in other cities, so they moved away. But they were in town on this particular day, and we had stayed up late the night before, and the night before that, and now it was late afternoon. Bonnie had a concert, and Ben was driving her to rehearsal, and Brandon was at the restaurant, and I was home alone. Because there was a bag of plums on the counter, and because it was the second day of October, I decided to bake a plum tart. The house was warm from sunlight and the oven preheating, and I put on a dress that I won’t get to wear again until June, and while the tart baked, I sat down at the kitchen table, turned to my left, and took that picture Floor Stand.

The next day, we ate plum tart for breakfast.

I miss my friends. Even though they ate most of the tart before I could take its picture .

The good news is, at least this thing is easy to make, and to make over again. It’s the easiest, quickest tart recipe I can think of, and I’m not just saying that because I made it four days ago and it’s on my mind cristal champagne. The recipe comes from the esteemed Alice Medrich, from her book Pure Desserts, and she calls it a rustic plum tart. I’m tempted to call it a plum tart cake, because it’s a little like both and that’s how I am, but you can decide. Mix up some flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt, and then work in a beaten egg and some butter until you wind up with something like yellow sand. Press that lightly into a tart or cake pan, whichever you want, and then arrange some plain cut-up plums on top, and less than an hour later, it’s on. The plums soften into pockets of loosely contained jam, and the crust puffs up around them, tender-crumbed in the middle like a coarse cake and crunchy at the edges. I can imagine it with whipped cream after dinner, but mostly, I think of it as a nice thing to eat in the afternoon, with something hot to drink. And in the morning, with coffee, it also makes a totally reasonable stand-in for buttered-and-jammed toast. Especially if the company is right solar motor.