We spent a few days in France at my mum’s and autumn is the ideal season for hot South of France. Relatively high temperature (26C), cool nights and plenty of my favourite fruits still around. We went foraging for some muscat grapes and almonds around the house…

I had planned to eat the grapes just as they were, muscat grapes are the grapes to make the famous dessert wine, they are very sweet, with a thin skin and few pips, the perfect table grapes. And I couldn’t quite remember how long it took to pick almonds from when I was young. First you need to check if the tree doesn’t produce bitter almonds…and we got through one or two that we had to discard after spitting out every single piece of chewed bitter almond. It really is disgusting and also toxic containing some kind of cyanic acid. But don’t worry, biting on 1 bitter almond never killed anybody, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to tell you all about it. Collecting sweet almonds is fun, particularly when nicked from someone else’s field right in front of their house. The English husband didn’t like it at first but quickly got used to it and helped me to collect enough almonds, I thought, to bring back to London.

Of course my mum had decided otherwise and when we got back she said: “What a good idea to make a tart, I just happen to have some pre-rolled puff pastry in the fridge!”. My mum doesn’t bake much therefore I sensed that this tart trap has been pre-meditated and of course I felt into it. Since she fed us all kind of wonders and took us out to a beautiful gastronomic restaurant, I owed her at least a tart. I decided to use some plums that were in the fruit bowl, the muscat freshly foraged and use the almonds to make a marzipan to catch all the juices from the juicy grapes. Everyone loved it!