Sweetness and Light: Apple Vanilla Tart

My boy is suddenly into baking. It started with some muffins from the Hummingbird Bakery book (still the standard text for him), then he graduated to lemon-drizzle cake, then a simple plum cake, and so on (all enjoyed by his classmates at school, where he can get even more applause than at home). He found this recipe of mine, and made it on his own, amazing and delighting us. (Tip: The best apples  are Pippins, Gravensteins, Granny Smiths, or Winesaps, anything but Golden Delicious, which are too bland.) The

Food memories: Fenway Park

I pretty much grew up in Fenway Park; at least it felt that way (for my mother, baseball was holy; when she retired, she moved to Arizona, and attended all the Spring-training games she could, happily extending the season). Early every Spring, my mother would get the advance schedule of Red Sox home games, and we’d sit at the kitchen table plotting our Summer, picking our way through weekend and night games with our favorite enemies (the Yankees were top of the list, of course). When those chosen days came, we’d go downtown and board a bus for the 50-mile ride straight to Fenway in Boston, loaded with other baseball fans, chattering madly.
 
Day or night, the first step in the ritual, even before we bought a program, was to get a hot dog, dribble mustard over it (never ketchup!), and then pack in spoonfuls of sweet relish. The mustard was the bright yellow kind we knew as “ballpark