The Oncoming Hope

Remember Recession Busting Tip #2? Repeat after me: eat in season. Eat in season. It's good for the environment, it's good for farmers, and it's great for your taste-buds.

So today we feature the ever-humble tomato in one of my favorite summer dishes. It's light, it's tasty, and it fills your belly.

If you wanna use a store-bought pie crust, the prep for this dish will take about five minutes. But where's the fun in that?

Pie Crust

We're gonna keep it simple here. You need flour, cold butter (or butter substitute) and ice-cold water. The colder everything is, the better. If it helps, you can take off your shirt and pretend to be this guy:

Now get your flour into a large mixing bowl. You can use 3 1/2 cups of plain flour, but we have to pretend to be healthy these days, so I used 1.25 cups of wheat flour and 2.25 cups of plain flour.

Then, in a gesture swiftly undoing any attempt at healthiness, chop up 250 grams of butter (or butter substitute) and add it to the mix.

Massage it in until it becomes like this:

Then add half a cup of ice-cold water and mould into a ball of dough.

Now here's a neat trick you probably didn't expect. Cut the dough in half, and freeze one half of it. Why? It's extra. Save it for another pie. Through it at your husband or hated adversary if you like. But we don't need it now.

Refrigerate remaining dough for 30 minutes.

Use 30 minutes to:

• Make homemade mustard, it's easy.
• Read a chapter of The Great Gatsby and marvel at Fitzgerald's beautiful prose.
• Get your dumbbells out and do a quick workout so you can look more like Val Kilmer, Ice-Man.

THE PIE ITSELF

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit (220 C)

Right here's the fun part. Roll out the dough.

You can either lay it into a pie tin or you can keep things loose (we're going with the latter here. Apparently this is often referred to as a galette, when you free-style the crust). Take the rolled out crust and lie it on a baking tin.

Blind bake for 5 minutes or so. Remove.

Take 2 tablespoons of dijon mustard and spread it over the crust, leaving a 2-inch border.

As you can see, I don't have enough mustard (oops!) so I whipped up a quick bechamel sauce, but normally mustard would be more than enough.

Take 2 large tomatoes and slice them thickly. Layer the slices over the mustard in a single layer, like so

Drizzle olive oil over the tomatoes, then sprinkle with feta cheese (or whatever you cheese you fancy, but if you use cheddar, don't use too much or it takes over the flavor).