Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I need to bring a dessert to the departmental picnic for Religion majors and minors and faculty (including Adjunct Professors, like me) this evening at a nearby park, so I got up this morning and decided to try to make a SWEET cherry tomato pie (instead of the savory pies, tarts, etc. for which recipes abound on the web).

My reasoning was that the SunGold cherry tomatoes from my garden are practically candy sweet already, so why NOT make a sweet pie from them, along the lines of a 'ground cherry' tomato pie my mother once made (but which I now -- belatedly -- recall didn't taste all that great) or the sweet scalloped tomato side dish I once enjoyed at "Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House" in Lynchburg, TN?

Of course, finding an actual recipe turned out to be quite a challenge. I finally found one recipe for little pies made with candied cherry tomatoes, as well as this fairly typical savory cherry tomato tart with basil. But I ended up using this cherry tomato croustade recipe, except I more than tripled the amount of sugar, added cinnamon and lemon zest in honor of the candied tomato recipe for the mini-pies, and cut most of the tomatoes into halves ahead of time.

It's a good thing I used only one of the two crusts in my box of refrigerator pie dough to make that yellow cherry tomato tart and decided to use the remaining crust to make an "insurance pie" from canned blueberry filling from the pantry and lots of frozen blueberries from the freezer, with a crumb topping on top. That's the pie I'll be taking with me to the get-together tonight, instead.

The tomato tart IS sweet, but somehow the lemon zest and sugar and cinnamon that I added to the pie filling just made the tomatoes taste even MORE like TOMATOES! So, I'll be eating that at home, by myself. Instead of the dessert I intended it to be, it wants to be eaten with lots of sharp cheese on the side and shredded basil on top. If I alternate a bite of sharp Swiss cheese with each bite of the tart, it's not bad at all!

Lesson learned? No tomatoes in desserts for me.