One knows that Father Time is catching up with oneself when having to learn new procedures becomes so annoying and cumbersome that one throws the towel in disgust rather than buckle down and learn the stupid new stuff.

This is the third time I’ve attempted to write a post sprinkled with a few of my little pics, as per usual. A simple task that has been rendered idiotically convoluted by some kid in management who updated something that worked perfectly well.

Recently, I posted the image above in Facebook and a couple of friends asked me for the recipe. Sure, I thought, I just write a quick cookery post. Ha! Since WordPress decided to improve their operations, nothing is simple any more. At least not writing a post in a blog I’ve maintained now for, hell, I don’t even remember, a decade or more?

Right now, for example, I’m searching for my media, the collection of previously posted images to this blog, so that I may add the pictures with which I plan to populate my new post. Using the “help*” feature on the page bottom [*which hasn’t actually been updated to reflect the new layout function], I learned that one can find one’s media by closing the draft to go back to the dashboard where they are listed. Following the instructions, I added my chosen pics, before returning to this draft. Let’s see, if I can now actually access them. Only five additional steps than previously, what fun!

I’ve also clicked repeatedly on the “justify” botton, with and without highlighting the paragraph(s) to be justified. Hasn’t happen yet. Nor will the justify button actually justify a following paragraph. I wonder what it might do … somewhere out there in the cursed world of wordpress. By the way, the auto-save function seems to be disabled as well.

But let’s return to the narrative.

As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, I enjoy baking pies with store-bought short-crust or puff pastry. It’s incredibly simple and brings out the wonderful flavours of summer vegetables. For example, not too long ago I experimented with some very thinly sliced bacon in puff pastry.

After spreading the bacon across the mustard-smeared pie bottom, I had some bacon slices left over. I laid them along the dough’s edge and folded the dough over the bacon. Turned out quite tasty. The rest of that particular pie consisted of just a thick layer of tomatoes and a persillade with lots of garlic.

The more recent tri-color pie one the other hand was a robust short-crust dough filled with zucchini, yellow and green sweet peppers, black olive bits, and tomatoes. Upon reflection, I feel compelled to rename it to:

TARTE à QUATRES COULEURS

• 1 ready-made round of short-crust pastry dough
• ~15 thin slices of Canadian bacon or similar, lean cured meat
• 2 firm zucchini, sliced diagonally in ~2 cm slices
• 1 yellow & 1 green pepper, sliced into rings and skinny bits
• however many sliced tomatoes it takes to cover the pie
• chopped black olives to taste
• grated Parmigiano
• crème fraîche or sour cream
• lemon zest
• ground coriander seeds
• salt & pepper

The vegetables listed above are just the ones I used, any combination of tomatoes with green, yellow, and black would please the eye and palate. Equally, the Canadian bacon happened to be on hand, other cured meats would work just as well – or none, although for us omnivores, the bacon adds a nice smoky-salty aspect to the pie.

All that’s left now are dense circles of overlapping zucchini and peppers, some more Parmigiano, freshly ground pepper, ground coriander seeds, and a little salt, before the finishing layer of tomato slices. I decorated the pie with some more pepper slices, black olives, dollops of crème fraîche, and more grated Parmigiano.

If you happen to have some bits and pieces of sun-dried tomatoes, they would be a welcome addition to enhance the rich aroma of ripe summer tomatoes!

We enjoyed our tarte with the raw odds and ends of the vegetables plus some very thinly sliced summer onion and a spritz of lemon.

P.S. It appears that “Grammarly”, my trusted spell-check buddy no longer works in this ever so improved version of WordPress. Since I’m an abysmal speller in all four languages I commonly use, please disregard the crazy stuff you might encounter in my writing. Thanks a bunch.