August 1, 2009

bite-size tomato tarts









These tiny tarts are delicious and quick and people get very excited about them, which is the best kind of summer party cooking.

There's no recipe, really: I cut circles from ready-made puff pastry with a 2 inch circular cookie cutter, and then topped them with a mixture of salami, cherry tomatoes, thyme and goat's cheese. Here are the combos I made (and it was nice to have a platter full of slightly different flavours):

* Salami & roast cherry tomato: I cut the salami to the same size as the pastry with the same cookie cutter. I cut the cherry tomatoes in half and roasted them for about half an hour before arranging them on top of the salami with a few thyme leaves.

* Goat's cheese & roast cherry tomato: I mixed some soft goat's cheese with a little salt and pepper and some thyme leaves, and topped with roast cherry tomatoes.

* Sweet cherry tomato: I didn't pre-roast these cherry tomatoes - instead, I cut them across-ways into small, round slices. I put a tiny bit of brown sugar on top of the pastry, then arranged the round slices of tomato in a circle and sprinkled with salt and pepper. I think these were my favourite flavour - the tomatoes stay quite firm and fresh, just beginning to melt, and the sticky sugar gives just the right hit of sweet. You can see one in the lower right hand corner of my last photo.

I baked them all on top of parchment paper in a 400°F / 200°C / Gas Mark 6 oven for about 25 minutes.