Category Archives: pie

Savory sweet potato, turnip and pecan galette with smoked gouda and cranberry sauce

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Sweet potato & cranberry galette

During the power outage (is she still going on about that? yes, but I’m almost done) it sometimes seemed to me that Malcolm has enough energy and Isaac is bright enough to light up the whole town. Monday night, the night of the storm, I had the clever idea of having a halloween movie-fest. We’d watched Coraline and were half-way through The Corpse Bride. Poor little Isaac was already hiding in the next room, creeping in to watch half a scene, and racing out again at the extra-spooky parts. And then the house went dark. Inky black dark, with wave upon wave of rain and wind battering the windows. Heh heh! Nothing to worry about here, boys! From that moment on I felt that I had to be brave and make the best of the situation for the boys. Of course I didn’t do such a good job of that, but I tried. Wednesday before the power came on we dropped them at school, and then I came back to the cold, silent house and indulged in a little breakdown. The truth is, the boys didn’t seem to mind the situation all that much. They handled it much better than I did. They were cheerful, especially Malcolm – nothing seemed to phase him. He didn’t mind not going to school and not taking baths, of course. He’s never felt the cold all that much, unless he’s sick. If TV wasn’t an option, he didn’t miss it. He loved making a fire in the backyard and holding bread over it to toast. He liked to play with the candles, which the small drops of wax on every single table in the house will forever remind us. He likes to be with his brother, though he drives him absolutely crazy. He liked to walk all around town, scrounging for interesting things thrown up by the storm. He liked playing games by candlelight. I taught him how to play spit, and he plays it exactly the way you’d expect him too. He’s smart and fast, but he keeps his cards in messy piles, which slows him down. I played blokus with Isaac, and though he’s sweet as sugar and was trying to let me win, he won anyway. Isaac seemed a little more nervous. When I sat in the kitchen playing solitaire, he stood close by me talking and talking, in the way he does when he’s anxious. He sang constantly. He sings his life. He seemed to try to fill up the unusual silence with his voice. When he got sick, his fast-paced nervous ramble accelerated as his fever rose, all through the night. When he finally got to sleep in the morning, Clio, who was ill herself, lay back to back with him, smushed up as close as could be. I took him to the emergency room to get a strep test, because none of the doctors had power in their offices. I was worried we’d have to wait for hours and hours, but I nearly cried with how efficient and nice the nurses and doctors were. I’ve spent a lot of time in waiting rooms with Isaac. It might sound siilly, but it’s an oddly precious time for me. We’re both usually a little tired and worried, and Isaac is so sweet and funny and chatty, and it always feels like a pocket of time separate from the rest of our days, running at its own pace in its own little world. In the emergency room the feeling was intensified, because we were so tired, and we were in a hospital, and all the days had been so strange. I had trouble sleeping at night during the blackout, because it was so completely dark and silent and cold. One night I ran through all of the events of the days in my head, cataloguing and documenting, trying to remember through the fog of my worry. It was a dark, cold week, but all of these moments with my boys glowed and shone.

This is something I had thought about making all through the blackout. The day we got power back, I roasted the sweet potatoes and turnips, warming up our icy kitchen and driving away the cold stale smell. We had (and still have!) tons of sweet potatoes. I thought it would taste nice to combine them with turnips (sweet & sharp) and a layer of cranberry sauce (sweet and tangy). Some lovely melted smoked gouda and crunchy pecans would provide the savory balance of texture and flavor. I thought it was very good. Malcolm, who had been back to school for two days, and was catching up on sleep, was so tired that he burst into tears and said, “I don’t always want pie. Sometimes I want a nice soup!” I didn’t have a full stick of butter left in my empty fridge, so I added some olive oil, and it really resulted in a flaky, crispy crust, so I might try it again! We ate the galette with potatoes roasted with cumin and paprika, which turned out very nice as well.

Here’s Velvet Underground with Beginning to See the Light. We’ve been teaching the boys about VU. And everything felt so upside down we very nearly did have wine in the morning and breakfast at night!

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Tomato and artichoke tart with walnut custard

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Tomato artichoke walnut tart

Here at The Ordinary’s institute of culinary studies, we have an entire division devoted to the study of nut custards. It is completely staffed by squirrels, who are frantically busy this time of year. They are, in fact, so occupied with eating and burying the test subjects that they have not had an opportunity to report their findings. So many questions still remain. Viz: If a sweet baked almond custard is called frangipane, does that same word apply to a savory almond custard? How about a sweet hazelnut, pecan or walnut custard? How about a savory pecan, hazelnut or walnut custard? I know that I’ve discussed these issues before, and I’m in danger of becoming some sort of nut-custard fanatic, wandering the streets of town mumbling about nuts, but I need answers, dammit! It’s keeping me up nights! Not really, but I would like a better way to describe it. I’ve been experimenting lately with various types of nut custard in savory tart applications. For instance, we had a greens and pecan tart the other week. Some time back we had small chard and almond tarts. This being autumn, I decided to try one with walnuts. I made a sort of smoky, spicy, sharp sofrito of tomatoes and artichokes, and I added lemon zest to the walnut custard, to add a little brightness to the sweet earthiness of the nuts. A walnut custard is nice, soft underneath, slightly crispy on top. We need to come up with a new name for these new nut concoctions! We’ve created a committee, and we’d like report their findings, and to tell you the general consensus about the deliciousness of this tart, but the squirrels have taken all of their pieces to the tops of the trees, and won’t come back down to file their reports.

Here are the Squirrel Nut Zippers channelling Cab Calloway in The Ghost of Stephen Foster.

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Roasted beet, arugula and goat cheese tart

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Beet, goat cheese, and arugula tart

Our little garden is so wild and tangled at the moment. We didn’t grow much, just herbs and a few peppers and two pretty bull’s blood beets. The herbs have all gone to seed, and curl around each other in a crazed tangled web, which catches Clio as she runs through the garden, to emerge the other end with herbaciously scented paws. David brought the beets home in spring, tiny and pretty, with shiny deep red leaves. I was going to use them then, in a salad, and I did pick a few baby beet leaves. But then I thought I should wait, and save them till they were more fully grown, and the beets were bigger. Of course it’s hard to tell when a beet is ripe, because it’s underground. So I kept waiting and waiting, watching the leaves get longer and thicker, watching the beets themselves swell out of the ground. And still I didn’t want to use them too soon. I wanted to save them for something really special. I do this with all sorts of things! People will give me blank notebooks, and I’ll set them aside until I have something really important to write. I buy vanilla beans, from time to time, and save them to make some remarkable dish, only to lose them in the cupboard. I’m like this with ideas as well – I’ll have a good idea for something to write, or a film to make, and I’ll set it aside till it’s just the right moment to act on it, only to lose it in the giant dusty cluttered room that is my head. I’ll find it in a dream, maybe, tucked away in some dim corner of my mind. But this past week, looking over the decadent mess that my garden had become, it became very clear to me that it was time to pick the beets. And they were lovely! A bit past it maybe, but so pretty inside, with rings of pink and rings of scarlet. I think my new motto will be EAT THE BEET!! Seize the moment! Don’t save it for a special day, because the very act of eating it will make a day special.

I wanted to do something to showcase their prettiness, so I roasted them and set them on top of a tart. I used the red leaves to color the custard. If you have regular beet greens, I think they’ll still work in this, but the custard will be greenish instead of pink – which will also look nice with the beets! I think the combination of roasted beets, arugula and goat cheese is a classic one, and that’s what we have here.

Here’s Pete Rock with What You Waiting For?

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Greens, olives & pecan tart

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Greens olives and pecan tart

Malcolm and Isaac did some free writing in school. Isaac said that he wrote about Clio, our puppy. He wrote that she was mostly housebroken. It’s sweet that he loves her, and he’s “writing what he knows,” which is the oldest advice in the book. He’s writing about something solid and important to him. We asked Malcolm what he wrote about, and I expected something along the same lines. “Tennis ball world!” Yes, a world made entirely of tennis racket strings. We all have tennis balls on our shoes, and we bounce from place to place. And there’s water under the tennis racket strings, and we all have cups that we can dip in the water… I love both answers so much! For some reason it made me think of Thoreau’s quote, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” For Malcolm and Isaac at this moment, imagination is their work. Letting their minds wander, and inventing new worlds and new ways of living in this world is their job. I love to see the earthbound objects that hold their flights of fancy. Everything they see and hear and find and eat, everything is fed into the fire of their imaginations and comes out wonderfully transformed. My mom and dad gave Malcolm my old tennis rackets. Isaac’s new pictures of dragons have Clio’s claws. It’s all connected. I hope as they get older they manage to find a balance between practical and fantastical. I’ve seen their drawings and heard their stories, I know they’ll both make remarkable castles.

This tart has layers. It has lots of greens. It’s very densely greeny. The crust is tall and thin and crispy, to provide some crunch for all the greeniness. We got bags of small fall lettuces from the CSA. They’re a little bitter, and very delicate. Not to everyone’s taste in a salad. But if you sautee them lightly, and then combine them with eggs and cheese, their sharpness provides just the right kick. If you can’t find little fall lettuces, you can use arugula. The second layer also involves greens. It’s chard, not pureed, but chopped, so it retains some of it’s lovely texture. It’s combined with olives and garlic. And the top layer is a sort of pecan frangipane – another custard, that has the sweet nutty taste of pecans whirled right in.

Here’s one of my all time favorites…Clap Your Hands Say Yeah with Mama Won’t You Keep Them Castles in the air Burning?
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Roasted butternut & portobello tart with a pecan crust

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Butternut and portobello tart

I talked to a woman the other day who told me that her son had lost everything in the horrible foreclosure nightmare. They’d lost their home, and they sold all of their possessions. They have nothing, she said, and… you know…they’re happy! I laughed and said that we have so much stuff. Piles and piles of stuff. Every surface of our house has a big pile of stuff on it, that we “go through” from time to time, but that we can’t get rid of. We’ve said that we should have a yard sale, but a) we don’t have a front yard (we live in a city, man, we have a stoop) and b) nobody would want any of our stuff! What we have is piles of drawings – I find it hard to get rid of the boys’ drawings, and Isaac, alone, produces several books’ worth each day. All of their little notes and doodles and ingenious inventions of tape and cardboard. Every little Halloween costume they’ve ever worn. Every report card. And we have books, piles of books. Books too big for shelves. Books we can’t put away because we might need to consult them at any minute of the day. Books you just like to walk by and see, because they’re inspiring. And David and I have presents that we’ve made for each other over the years. They’re unspeakably valuable to me, but they’re crazy! And it’s just possible that nobody else would see their worth. Clay birds and felt birds and drawings of birds. Paintings and pictures and cards. Little films, beautiful boxes and books and painted film cans. On and on it goes, this jumbled portrait of our love and friendship! I’m notoriously terrible at finishing things, so I’ve given David a lifetime’s supply of nearly-done projects. I’ve almost finished embroidering some deer onto a piece of linen. Someday I may finish sewing a poor felt deer who has wire legs sticking out in an alarming fashion. The best present I’ve ever ever ever gotten, though, was for my 32nd birthday. David made me a chair. And it’s such a Claire-y chair. It’s got secret drawers and compartments. It’s green. It’s got a writing desk built on. It’s solid and graceful and elegant. It’s inspiring and hopeful and sweetly encouraging, and sweetly inscribed. I love it so much! And, at the moment, it’s covered in drawings that Isaac has done. But I love them, too.

My green chair

And I’ve taken to making presents I can finish, presents that don’t collect dust, presents that feed the family! Such a one is that butternut tart. It has a crispy pecan crust. It has meaty balsamic roasted mushrooms, it has a sweet, sage-and-nutmeg flavored custard, and it has smoky smoky smoked gouda. It’s like autumn in a tart! It’s like a savory pumpkin pie! We had this for David’s birthday dinner. It’s transient, but full of love!

Here’s Cee Lo Green’s sweet All Day Love Affair.
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Green tomato tarte tatin revisited

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Green tomato tarte tatin

Well! October 11th will mark the one year anniversary of this blog! How time flies. We’ll be celebrating with a spectacular fireworks display and a regatta along the delaware. It’s silly how addicted to it I’ve become! It’s silly how I’ve almost come to think of it as work – as my work. I actually work very hard at it, which is also foolish. Anyway, in looking back at some of my earliest posts, I’m embarrassed by the poor quality of the pictures and the slight and meandering writing. But I’m hoping that the recipes are still sound. I’ve decided to go back and remake a few, following my own directions as exactly as possible. I guess I’m testing them! And I’m taking better photos. In most cases I won’t do a whole new post, I’ll just sub in the better photo. If I make some big changes, I might do a whole new post, as I’m doing now. Although I didn’t really make a big change!

Anyway, I’ll try to keep it brief, since this is a do-over. I’d just like to say that I felt very happy, picking these tomatoes. It was at the CSA. I was hot as hell, sweating like a madman, face burning to a crisp. But there was something so hopeful about the rows and rows of tomato plants laden with heavy pale green-just-turning-rosy tomatoes. And then I heard some high-pitched peep-peeping. Goldfinches! Brighter than day, and closer than I’d ever seen them, on top of the tomato stakes, talking to one another. Beautiful!

Green tomato tarte tatin

So – this tarte tatin was as good as I’d remembered it! I decide to redo the whole post, because the last time I posted I was very strange and luke-warm about the whole thing, and I didn’t write up the recipe like a recipe. Claire, what were you thinking? Let me assure you the tart is lovely – sweet, savory, vegetal, with a very satisfying crust. Last time I cooked the tomatoes in a frying pan, and transferred them to a cake pan. This time, I cooked them in the frying pan, without moving them much at all, and then I put the crust on top and put the whole thing into the oven. Which worked very well, and is my recommended method, if you have a frying pan with a metal handle!

Here’s The Roots with Popcorn Revisited.
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Chickpea flour chard frittata-cake (with olive sofrito)

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Chard & chickpea flour cake

I’m not very good at sitting still. I’ve tried doing yoga or meditating once or twice, but as soon as I try to clear my head, it fills with silly thoughts and petty anxieties. When I try to sit and write, I find myself jumping up every few minutes to do something that doesn’t actually need to be done. Yesterday, I attempted to master the art of being still. I’ve written the underdog’s theme song, and absolved lack of competitive instinct and lack of ambition everywhere. At the moment I’d like to champion a brief spell of staring into space. It’s been a spate of immaculate weather. We were trying to think of the perfect thing to do after dinner – homework all done, but still a school night. We weren’t organized enough for a walk of any kind. Maybe we’d sit around a fire in the backyard. But I found myself sitting in a chair by the front door. The sky was bright as day, but the room was filling with darkening blue light at an autumn pace – always surprising and even slightly worrying. The boys were playing kickball in the backyard. They were giggling maniacally – beautiful, but I’m sure they were hitting the window and the recycling bins on purpose. David was in the kitchen sneezing, and covering Malcolm’s text book with a brown paper bag, the way humans have covered textbooks for all eternity. The boys ran in and out of their showers, cool, pale and giggling. They disappeared into the backyard, as the sky finally deepened outside the window, and in the room it became too dark to write. The smell of smoke and the sound of loved voices pulled me into the backyard, where the sky was still palely glowing.

Chard and chickpea flour frittata

And before all of this activity? I made the best meal! I’m really proud of it! I think I may have invented it! I’m not even sure what to call it! It’s like a frittata, but it has chickpea flour in it, which gives it a lovely substantiality and flavor. It’s also got sauteed chard, mozzarella, some garlic, some rosemary, and some basil. We cut it into thick wedges, and ate it with sofrito (spanish style). I’d made a big batch with all of the paste tomatoes I picked last week. I froze some of it for winter, and I set some aside, and added olives and a roasted red pepper (also from the farm!) You could make a simple tomato sauce instead, though. (Both recipes below) And we had a nice, simple heirloom tomato salad as well.

Olive & red pepper sofrito

The cool, blue sounds of Jackie Mittoo’s Evening Time.
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Every kind of tomato tart, with a semolina crust

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Every kind of tomato tart

Is there any anxiety in life more pleasant than that of having too many tomatoes? I think not! I look forward to this moment all year long. I went to the CSA last week and picked the beautiful little golden tomatoes, the tiny bright orange tomatoes, the big green sauce tomatoes. The next morning we picked up our CSA box and … even MORE TOMATOES! My counter is overflowing with tomatoes, the garden is overgrown with basil, and I’m overjoyed at the over abundance. Isaac dispatched the cherry tomatoes in no time – he eats them like candy. I have so many fiendish plans for the rest of the tomatoes. Be warned, I’ll be pelting you with tomato recipes all week!

Fresh tomato tart

The tomatoes are so pretty, in all their various shapes and sizes and colors, that the first thing I wanted to make was a simple tart to showcase them in all their glory. The wondrous trinity of tomatoes, mozzarella and basil is combined here, elegantly packed into a crunchy semolina crust. I kept everything very simple and spare, so that the tomatoes themselves would really shine. They’re lovely here – cooked long enough to be soft and juicy, but not so long that they’re mushy. You can taste the subtle difference in each type of tomato in every bite of this tart. This tart was a breeze to put together. I made the crust before work, and it cooked in about half an hour. Simple, quick, pretty, and delicious. And gone! We ate the whole thing in one sitting.

Here’s Freddy McKay with Love is a Treasure. And so are september tomatoes! (I love this song!)

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French lentil, roasted mushroom tart with savory almond topping

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French lentil mushroom tart

I feel strangely excited, and of course I’m going to tell you why. It has to do with the election. Wait! Wait! Don’t tune out! I’m not going to tell you about my humble beginnings and how I love America more than anybody else does, and I’m not going to ask for a small donation. It’s a little hard to articulate, but I feel genuinely hopeful about this. It seems to me that, in some way, the needs of the people – the very human needs of all the people – is shaping the rhetoric of the election in a way that I don’t remember happening before on this level. (Of course that might be because my memory is full of holes and I’m politically dumb as a bag of flour.) Feminists have talked for decades about the personal being political, which is an idea that I embrace. This election cycle, (as they call it, which also makes it seem human and part of nature, somehow) it seems as though all of the politicians are struggling to connect with us by making the political personal. Maybe it’s the healthcare debate. Whatever your feelings on the subject, I think everybody agrees that healthcare is about us at our most human and most vulnerable. Of course it’s also about insurance companies and corporations, but at its most crucial, it’s about our life and our death, our bodies and our well-being. I think it’s hard not to become emotional when we consider this issue, which makes it difficult to discuss rationally, perhaps, but it’s important for us to learn this form of discourse – to learn to talk about personal emotional subjects. Maybe it’s because times have been so hard for all of us. We’re all hurting, and it makes us more insular, for better or for worse. We’re anxious about our homes, and our ability to keep them. We’re thinking about the food we put on our table. And this election is about women. We’re told over and over that the women are going to decide this election, and that’s forced a (sometimes uncomfortable) discussion about women’s bodies, and women’s work, and the value of that work. Of course, everything’s intimately connected. The “serious” issues of war, taxes, foreign policy – they’re all ultimately personal, they’re about our daily lives, our loves, our families, the chance to follow the path to old age that we all travel together. I always have this feeling, when I listen to politicians talk, that there’s a truth and sense that they can’t tell us with their words, that we hear anyway. Sometimes they try to hide it – when they tell us we need to go to war, with a barrage of words and falsified facts, I feel like most people understand the truth anyway – we know their motives. This year I feel the sense is closer to the surface under the muddle of words – the sense that we’re all in it together, and we’ll learn a way to talk about that.

Since the food we put on our table is an important issue, i’m going to tell you about this handsome tart! It’s actually quite simple. It’s a standard flaky pate brisee crust, with rosemary and black pepper added for deliciousness. On top of that we have a layer of french lentils sauteed in port wine and balsamic vinegar. Lentils might seem like an odd ingredient in a tart, but they add real substance and texture, and their lovely meaty flavor. And the mushrooms are chopped chunkily and roasted, so that when the savory almond custard is baked all around them, it’s almost like a savory clafouti or toad-in-the-hole. If I do say so myself, and I do, the whole thing turned out super-tasty. David liked it a lot, and said it’s a “birthday meal.”

Here’s Women’s Realm by Belle and Sebastian

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Chard and artichoke tart with a crispy eggplant crust

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Eggplant-crusted chard tart

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about, in a very confused fashion, for the last half a day (and night!) We all know the myth of Icarus – his father, Daedalus, fashioned him a pair of wings made of wax and feathers. He warned him not to fly too close to the sun, but he was so giddy with the joy of flight, that he forgot his father’s words, flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, he continued happily flapping his arms, but without feathers he could no longer fly. He fell into the sea and drowned. And we all know the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, attibuted to Bruegel. It’s a beautiful painting of a beautiful landscape, with people going about their business, unaware of Icarus’ fall, which is small and on the edge of the painting. And people have written poems about the painting. Auden’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, in which he describes how suffering “takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” And William Carlos Williams wrote a poem by the same name as the painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. So that’s the “evidence” and here are the questions… what does it all mean? Is Auden suggesting, as the word “dull” implies, that the ploughman and the angler are too coarse to take note of the tragedy of loftier men? Or is it that, simply, things go unnoticed. We’re so taken with our own lives and concerns that we don’t have the time or energy to commiserate with others? Is the original myth really a warning about excessive hubris? Or, was Icarus just enjoying the feeling of flight to such an extent that he forgot to be careful? People suffer all the time – ploughmen and anglers and painters and poets and master inventors. I suppose all the suffering is equally important (or unimportant) whether somebody paints a picture of it, or writes a poem or about it, or doesn’t notice it at all. The painting itself is so gorgeous, the people walking along with supposed dullness are so vibrantly portrayed. And, as the poets say, spring is in full glory, the sea is cool and pretty, the sun is hot and strong, and all of this will be true no matter what the fate of the men passing through the landscape. And then I can’t not think of Stephen Dedalus, with his suggestion that ‘The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ Surely not, Joyce. Surely not! That quote has always bothered me. I’d love to have a meal with Pieter Bruegel, and Williams Carlos Williams, and WH Auden, and maybe even Ovid, and drink some wine and talk it all over.

Chard tart with crispy eggplant crust

Maybe I’d make them this eggplant crusted chard and artichoke tart! I think it turned out quite pretty, and it certainly tasted good. The “crust” is made entirely of pieces of eggplant, dipped in egg, then dipped in pecans, breadcrumbs and a touch of flour, and then roasted in olive oil. I used a lot of bread crumbs and a small amount of flour, but if you used only pecans and gluten-free breadcrumbs, you’d have a gluten-free crust! The filling is soft and flavorful and savory, and the pine nuts add a nice toasty crunch on top. I served this with a smooth smoky, spicy, sweet sauce made with fresh tomatoes, green peppercorns, olives and raisins.

Tomato-raisin-olive sauce

Holy smoke! I forgot to post a song yesterday! Horrors. Here’s Alec Ounsworth with This is Not My Home (After Bruegel)
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