Category Archives: crust

Tart with pumpkinseed-sage custard and roasted butternut coins

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Polkatart

There’s been such a nice frisson lately between winter and spring. The air is filled with the fragrance of flowers, but the evenings are cool enough for people to use their fireplaces, and the combination of smells is at once hopeful and nostalgic. This tart is like that a little, to me. Although slightly autumnal, there’s something about the combination of flavors and the very tart-shaped shape of it, that’s as suitable to early spring as to early fall.

It’s a polka dot tart! A polka tart! I think butternut squash and sage make such a perfect combination. The one sweet and mild, and the other strong and sort of earthy. (How would you describe sage? It’s indescribable!) When I made my pumpkinseed sage sauce, I thought it would be perfect with coins of roasted squash. And then I thought, why not take it one step further, and combine it all in one neat package? After all, I’d been thinking of this as a sort of pesto, and I love to use basil pesto in a tart. It turned out very delicious all together. The flaky crust added just enough crunch to the tender tart. A perfect spring meal with a big green salad.

Here’s Noble Sissle with Polka Dot Rag. Have a dance around the kitchen while you wait for your tart to bake!

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Malcolm’s peppery pepper crisps

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pepper crisps

The boys were home all last week for spring break, bringing their own little whirlwind of boyish joy and drama. Do I look frazzled? We had a nice week, though. We went away for a few days, which we never do. And I got to go on lots of walks with Malcolm. He’s good to walk with because he talks and talks. You can just walk next to him and listen. He talks about how he gets all his best ideas right before bed, he wonders if I’d like yoshi from some game we don’t have, he thinks that everybody thinks that we’ll have flying cars some day, he had one lamb’s ear that we bought that died, and one he dug up that lived a long time till some kid at a party tipped it out of its pot. And he came up with the idea for these peppery crisps. He wanted them to be very spicy and very crispy. He wanted them to have lots of different kinds of pepper in them. Sweet red peppers, red pepper flakes, cayenne, black pepper, and smoked paprika. He wanted to make the red peppers themselves crispy, but I couldn’t think how we’d do that, so we made the roasted peppers into a puree, and mixed it into a sort of pastry dough. Then we rolled the dough out quite thin, cut them into diamonds, and fried them in olive oil. They got nice and puffy and crispy, and they didn’t take too much oil to make. Everybody loved them! Isaac ate them by the fistful (and he’s a hard boy to feed!). Malcolm was a little disappointed that they weren’t spicy enough, so we’ll up the red pepper flake content next time.

I made some ginger and basil red bean dip to go with them. Very quick to make and tasty. But they were quite flavorful all on their own!!

Red bean dip

Here’s Desmond Dekker with Mother Pepper
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Cornmeal crusted pies with roasted chickpeas

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Roasted chickpea pies with cornmeal crust

I had a dream the other night about chickpeas roasted with thyme. I could pretend that this represented something else. Say the chickpeas represent my sons (in truth, when they were born we called them chickpea-head, because they had such lumpy little bald heads they looked like chickpeas!) and thyme represents time, which is running and passing, running and passing. But let’s face it, in reality I just dream about food! The nice thing about dreaming about food, is that if you wake up and can’t get back to sleep, you can think about how you’d make the food in your dream. A good way to take your mind off the more stressful goblins you can’t help chasing down dark and winding alleys at three in the morning. So I thought about chickpeas roasted with thyme, and thyme is part of the jerk spice family, so I thought I’d add some allspice and cayenne (don’t have scotch bonnet peppers!) And then I thought I’d add something green, like spinach, and something fresh, like parsley, and put it all in a cornmeal crust. (I had to resist the urge to use masa harina again! I can’t use it every day, can I?) Not hard to make, and tasty and fun to eat. And that’s all I’m going to say about that, because I have to be at work soon.

Here’s The Clash with Long Time Jerk, to go with the jerk seasoning. It’s strange, I’d never really listened to the lyrics to this before, but I just did the afternoon before I made this dinner. They seemed so strange and beautiful to me! About memory and desire and time passing.
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Pizza dumplings

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Pizza dumplings

The other night we made dumplings loosely based on our vision of the dumplings in Kung Fu Panda. While we were eating them, we all talked about the different kind of things we could fill them with. Malcolm came up with the idea of pizza dumplings. He wanted them to be like the earth, with layers. An olive for the core, a layer of cheese, a layer of sauce and a layer of dough. So that’s what we tried to do.

Malcolm is writing an essay for school about what he wants to be when he grows up. I’m going to share some excerpts with you. Remember, this is still a work in progress – he’s at the prewriting stage. Here we go…

Bang! Pishhh! “Hey, chef I need 3 pies.”
In my opinion being a chef is very fun.
I want to be a chef because I like to cook with my mom and she says that I have great ideas for cooking. One of my favorite things to do is invent and cooking is like inventing.
I want to travel so I can go to Scotland and find out what they eat there. Then I will learn how to cook food all over the world.

I hope he will!

Here’s Desmond Dekker with Sugar Dumpling.
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Dumplings – baked or steamed

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dumplings

I’m not a fan of big movies. I was an independent filmmaker in a pre-child life. That’s part of it. I’m naturally contrary. That’s a contributing factor. I don’t like the big films that I feel like I’m supposed to like. Most of the time those big films also tell you how you’re supposed to feel – now you laugh, now you cry. They don’t bother with subtlety at all. It’s like they think we’re really thick. (They DO think we’re really thick!) I could go on and on, but I won’t (yet).

Sometimes a biggish film breaks through all of that, though, and defies expectations and makes me love it, despite my ornery ideas. I love Kung Fuuuuuuuuuuuuu Panda. I love both films, 1 & 2. Yes, it’s another tale of an unexpected underdog using unexpected physical force to defeat a bully who seems stonger and is really mean! Yes, that story has been told a bazillion times. But there’s something about Kung Fu Panda that rises above all of that. I asked Malcolm why he admired Po (the panda). He said, “because he’s happy all the time.” That’s exactly what I was thinking, although I’d used the word “cheerful” in my head. I love the fact that he doesn’t get discouraged, he doesn’t have a dark and brooding side, he doesn’t have an angry side. When he fights his stronger bullyish foe, he laughs. Even when he’s getting beaten, even when he surprises himself by doing well. He laughs! It’s so unexpected, so anti-drama, and yet it makes you care about him more, which makes it more dramatic. The other quality that I admire in Po, that you don’t see very often in your cooler-stock-hero characters, is that he’s a fan. He admires his cohorts so much that he’s bursting, he’s desperate, he’s glowing with the pleasure of being in the same space as them. Even when he should revel in being the best of the best, instead he’s a warm furry bundle of disbelieving gratitude at being in their presence.

We had a lot of leftovers from our black rice, black lentil, golden beet meal, and Malcolm asked if we could use them to make dumplings like in Kung Fu Panda. Of course we can! It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. So I made the dough while Malcolm was at school, and we put them together when he got home.

The dough is quite simple. Traditionally, they’re steamed. I don’t have a bamboo steamer, so I used my vegetable steamer, which is not huge. I could fit 3 dumplings in there. I decided to bake the rest, because I’ve always wondered if that was an option. It is! They turn out lovely! Crispy, just the right amount bread-y. The steamed ones were nice, too. David said the steamed ones felt inexplicably lighter. You could put anything in these! Leftover beans or vegetables. Cheese. Just beans, just veg. Anything! Pretty much any filling for any savory pastry I’ve ever posted on this blog would work in here. I’ll give you a few suggested fillings, but…go crazy!!

Here’s Cee Lo Green with Living Again. Another unexpected hero!
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Pupusa with pinto beans & spinach

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pupusa

I had a rough week, and for some reason I found it comforting to watch videos of old women making pupusa on youTube. It’s one of those foods, like stuffed grape leaves, and many others, that you like to think about a group of women making together. The process is all made with hands, it’s repetitive and circular and almost hypnotizing. And I have a new fascination with stuffed flatbreads, which goes so nicely with my fascination with savory pastries! I’m also starting quite an impressive flour collection. I’ve got toasted barley flour, rice flour, semolina flour, chickpea flour, tapioca flour, buckwheat flour, wheat flour, and now masa harina. I’ve been intrigued by this for a while, and now I’m a big fan!

Back to pupusa – it’s a Salvadoran dish made with masa harina, and it’s stuffed with cheese or meat or refried beans. It’s cooked on a hot, ungreased griddle. I’m sure the version I made is not like the real deal, but it was so tasty! David said it’s like a combination of tacos and mashed potatoes – it’s got a very comforting quality, the taste and texture as well as the process of forming and cooking. You make it by taking a handful of dough, and turning and pressing, turning and pressing, trying to keep the edges neat. I love the idea that the pupusa will be the shape and size of the palms of the maker. You can fill it with anything you like. I chose pinto beans, spinach, and sharp cheddar. Just substantial enough not to be mushy, just soft enough to provide a comforting contrast to the crispy outside. This is one of my favorite things I’ve made in a while – to make and to eat.

It’s also gluten free, as far as I know! And it would be vegan if you left the cheese out.

Here’s Espiritu Libre with A Mi Me Gustan Las Pupusas.
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Asparagus & Spinach quiche

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Asparagus quiche

We had this for dinner on St. Patrick’s day, and, I swear to god, I didn’t know it would be so green! It was not a calculated move! As it happens, green is my favorite color, so I’m exceedingly pleased that it turned out so green. I can’t really think of anything interesting to say about asparagus quiche at the moment, so I’ll just relate a few salient points. Firstly, I made this in an hour. One hour, start to finish! As it happens, I had some crust dough leftover, but even if you added dough-making time, it would still be, maybe, one hour 10 minutes. So it seems quite fancy (doesn’t it?) but it’s quick and easy. Second-of-all, I think it’s very pretty (and green). So it makes a nice spring-y meal. Even for a special day like Easter, I’d say. It’s flavored with a little basil and rosemary. And with nutmeg, because nutmeg belongs in a spinach quiche! I added some goat cheese, for freshness and tang. And now I’ll stop talking about it, or I’ll have gone on longer describing it than it takes to make it!

asparagus quiche

Here’s Nutmeg, by Art Pepper
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Beer-braised vegetable pie

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Beer-braised vegetable pie

I’m not really a fan of St. Patrick’s day. I’m not Irish, and even if I was, I think St Patrick’s day would piss me off, because I’m curmudgeonly like that. Plus I have to work in a pub-like restaurant on St Patrick’s day and I’m scared that they’re going to make me wear a green plastic bowler hat. They wouldn’t do that, would they?

However, everywhere I’ve looked lately I’ve been reading about mother-flippin beef stew, with beer in it. And it actually sounds kind of good. And it would make a lovely pie. And I had turnips and carrots and mushrooms whispering to me from my vegetable drawer. So this is what I made… It has a peppery crust made with dark beer. It has balsamic-roasted mushrooms, but cut quite fat and juicy. It has carrots and turnips braised in beer. It has sage, rosemary and thyme. It has sharp cheddar. And it has some toasted oats. It’s my nod to St Patrick’s day, and it is very yummy, as it would be on any day of the year.

Here’s The Pogues with Bottle of Smoke, because I love it and it’s stuck in my head! I like the idea of a bottle of smoke, too.
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Flakin’ bacon

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Flakin Bacon

Don’t think I’m crazy, but I had a recurring dream about this. (I told David and he said, “Dream kitchen!” Which seems like such a nice idea to me!) And then I spent several nights sleeping very strangely, because my mind was busy trying to figure out how to make this!

I don’t talk very much about being a vegetarian. It’s so much a part of my life, that it doesn’t really seem notable any more. But I’ve been thinking lately that I’d like to tell the world about my idea of being a joyful vegetarian. Not depriving myself of anything, but so completely happy and satisfied with the ridiculous amount of good things to eat that don’t involve killing animals, that there’s really no need and no time to eat an animal at all. However…when I smell bacon cooking, I do miss it a little bit. Which might be why I dreamed this! I’d like to say it has everything that bacon has, minus the blood and bad-for-you-ness. It’s smokey and salty and crunchy.

I must have been reading about rusks, because in my dream I baked these at an incredibly low temperature for a very long time. But in reality, I didn’t want them to be so hard you had to soak them in water before you ate them. I wanted them to be very very crispy, and a little bit chewy on the inside. So then my mind turned to different possibilities. I thought about pizza crust, I thought about crackers. I thought about naan. In the end I decided to do some combination of naan and pastry dough and maybe a little pizza crust, though no yeast. I even did streaks of smoked gouda to give you some of the different streaks of color one might encounter, you know…in bacon. And I pan-fried them in olive oil. Mmmmmmm.

Here’s Cisco Huston with Beans, Bacon and Gravy. I’m sorry, Cisco, but I never get tired of beans!
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Paté en croute – vegetarian style

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Pate en croute

This dish is so fancy! How fancy is it? Well, you’ve got your paté, and you’ve got your croute. That’s fancy! Can’t you just hear Mrs. Patmore saying, “Daisy, stop your daydreaming, and get this up to the grand dining room before Lady Mary collapses in her corset!” Of course, in that scenario, this would probably be stuffed with pheasants. Not here, my friend!

Break it down, and this isn’t hoity toity at all. It’s two of my favorite flavors together – roasted mushrooms & french lentils – mixed with ground almonds, ground hazelnuts, a bit of cheese and some herbs. And all wrapped in a peppery, flaky crust. Now doesn’t that sound good? And healthy? This isn’t hard to make, and most of the components can be made ahead and saved until you’re good and ready for them. I believe there are pans devoted to the preparation of patés. I don’t have one of those! I do have a nice loaf pan from ikea. It’s a little longer and thinner than your average loaf pan. In truth, any such loaf pan would do. This serves quite a few people, and it does seem special, so it would make a nice dinner party meal. But we had a nice weeknight dinner of it- thick slices of this concoction, roasted rosemary potatoes and a big salad.

Here’s Fancy Pants, by Count Basie and his orchestra.
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