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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.
One day, some years ago, a group of friends arrived in Barcelona for four days. For many of them, it was their first visit. They had the very best intentions - the Picasso Museum, plenty of Gaudi and Miro - but instead, they spent their days eating. Well, their nights staying up late, drinking and talking; their mornings sleeping; their afternoons wandering the city looking for more food; their evenings in tapas bars; their late evenings in restaurants. Since then, most of them have been back to Barcelona and seen everything they intended to on that trip, and more. I doubt any of them would change the way they first discovered the city.
I know I wouldn't. I'd rarely eaten Spanish food before, and there's something so wonderful about discovering a cuisine in the country of its origin. My memories of that and subsequent trips to Spain are very bound up in its food: eating empanadas in a sunny square in Granada before searching the streets for Lorca's house (we found it full of children and men dressed as sailors); hot chorizo sandwiches with sweet sherry, late at night in the Jewish Quarter of Seville; albondigas in a tiny bar in the Alpujarras, watching Eurovision. But I discovered patatas a lo pobre on that trip to Barcelona, my first time in Spain, with those very dear friends.
Patatas a lo pobre roughly translates as 'poor man's potatoes', and it's very simple: potatoes cooked slowly in oil, with green capsicum (peppers), onions and bay leaves. It's one of those alchemical dishes in which the simplest of ingredients become complex and surprising in the finished product. It's Andalusian, although it's cooked all over Spain (along with that other incredibly good potato dish, patatas bravas), and it's wonderful with fish or roast meats.
{Also, I would love someone to tell me the correct name for this dish - is it patatas a la pobre, or patatas a lo pobre? I can find both versions online, although the former tends to be on the menus of British restaurants. It's 'a la' in the Moro cookbook, too, which is where this recipe comes from. Alas, it's been too long since I ate these in Spain to remember how they were spelled there.}
Patatas a lo Pobre
adapted from The Moro Cookbook, by Sam and Sam Clark (US, UK)
8 tbsp olive oil
1 red (Spanish) onion, thinly sliced
1 large green capsicum (pepper), roughly diced
2 bay leaves, preferably fresh
3 or 4 large, waxy-skinned potatoes
Heat 3 tablespoons of the olive oil in a heavy bottomed saucepan over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the onion and a pinch of salt. Cook the onion slowly, turning down the heat if necessary, for about 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until golden and sweet in smell and taste. Now add the garlic, capsicum (green pepper) and bay leaves and cook for 15 more minutes to release their flavour.
Meanwhile, cut the potatoes in half lengthways and each half in two or three wedges, depending on the size of the potato. Salt them lightly and leave for about 5 minutes. When the capsicum (pepper) has softened, add the remaining oil and when the oil is hot again, add the potatoes. Let everything simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for another 15-20 minutes or until the potatoes are tender. Drain in a colander or sieve, keeping the onion oil aside for further use if desired. Serve immediately.
Is there such a thing as a light potato salad? Probably not. Potato is one of the earth's heavier substances, and that's as it should be. But when the weather warms and you're baking pork chops and you want a little something on the side, but the thought of mayonnaise or sour cream is too daunting, may I present this solution: a potato salad that's creamy with mustard and bright with parsley.
The dressing is loosely borrowed from a bean salad in Simon Hopkinson's Week In, Week Out, a compilation of 52 of his weekly food columns for The Independent. I love the way Hopkinson writes and cooks. He's unapologetically irritable - sort of the Simon Cowell of UK food writers. But he's also generous, passionate, perfectionist, uncompromising; and his food is so good.
I haven't specified the amount of potato - the recipe makes plenty of dressing, more than I needed for the pound of potatoes I cooked, so there's room for maneuver.
Creamy Mustard Potato Salad
small waxy-skinned potatoes (I used red Yukons)
1 tbsp smooth Dijon mustard
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1/2 clove garlic, peeled and crushed
4 tbsp warm water
150 ml peanut oil
150ml extra virgin olive oil
salt & pepper1 red onion, diced very fine
a handful of parsley
Peel the potatoes and place in a saucepan with plenty of water. Bring to the boil; add a dash of salt once boiling. From this point, cook the potatoes for 10-15 minutes, or until just tender. Drain.
While the potatoes are cooking, combine the mustard, red wine vinegar, garlic and warm water. Blend or whisk until smooth. Slowly add the oils and blend/whisk well until the dressing is creamy. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Fry the finely diced red onion in a little hot butter or oil for 3 or 4 minutes (if you like raw onion, feel free to omit this step).
Carefully cut the cooked potatoes into small chunks - whichever size you prefer, really. Toss with the dressing, the red onion, and a handful of parsley leaves, some chopped and some left whole. Add more salt and pepper if necessary.
This dressing is also delicious drizzled over barely-blanched green beans.
I'm envious and admiring today of people with houses and gardens and vegetable patches; of the pleasure they must feel at this time of the Northern Hemisphere year, when just three days of bright, hot weather can make all the difference to their sprouts and seedlings. Suddenly, we have blossoms and magnolias, buds on the barest of winter trees, and birds singing late into the evening. This tangible sense of the world's turning still astonishes my sub-tropical soul. It also makes sense of a great deal of poetry.
These crisp filo pastries filled with tart feta cheese and bursts of mint are just right for eating out of doors with a green salad and a glass of white wine some sweet, late-April evening - like this one.
Take the sheets of filo pastry out of the refrigerator only when you're ready to use them (they dry out quickly). Work with the pastry as fast as you can for the same reason. Brushing with the melted butter will soften areas that have hardened, and don't worry too much about neatness.
It's also quite difficult to explain in words how to form the triangles themselves. I've included some photographs of the process, but the need to work quickly so the filo won't tear made that difficult. It's much easier and more intuitive than it looks; once you're in the thick of things, the next step will feel obvious.
Feta & Mint Triangles
adapted from Claudia Roden, Arabesque (US, UK)
7 oz feta cheese, mashed with a fork
1 egg, lightly beaten
3 tbsp chopped mint
1 tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
salt & pepper
8 large sheets filo
1 stick (8 tbsp) butter, melted (yes, this feels like a lot of butter, and I didn't use it all. You might want to begin with half a stick and gauge what more you think you might need.)
To make the filling, mash the feta cheese with the egg, chopped mint and lemon juice. Season with a little salt and pepper.
Preheat the oven to 300° Fahrenheit / 150° Celsius.
Just before you're ready to use them, cut the sheets of pastry into four rectangles measuring about 12 inches x 4.5 inches and put them in a pile on top of each other. Brush the top piece of pastry thoroughly with melted butter.
Take about a tablespoon of filling and place it in the upper right hand corner of the top sheet of pastry. Fold this upper right hand corner across the filling in order to form a triangle, leaving about a 1 cm strip of pastry free (see photographs below).
Fold this free strip of pastry over the edge of the triangle, brushing with butter and tucking the excess at the very top underneath. Now you should have a folded triangle of cheese-filled pastry with about 2/3 of the filo rectangle still visible. Brush with more butter and then lift the highest tip of the triangle and fold it down over the pastry once; brush again with butter, and fold again until you have a neat triangle shape. There should be a little excess pastry, which you can neaten by brushing with butter and folding over the edge of the triangle.
Do the same with the remaining strips of pastry and cheese filling. Place the triangles, seam side down, on a baking sheet and brush the tops with melted butter. Bake for 30 minutes or until golden. Serve warm.
It's still winter - still very definitely winter, in the frigid part of the world I live in - but I'm ready to stop eating as if it's winter. We had fresh snow last night, but earlier in the week I walked outside without a coat and was so startled to hear birds that I thought, for a moment, a poltergeist had hit play on my stereo. So in that brief respite I made myself a spring-like lunch: this caramelised onion and tomato tart.
The inspiration for this tart is Claudia Roden's Alsatian onion tart in The Book of Jewish Food (US, UK). That tart, tomato-less and heavier with onions, is one of my favourite things to eat. Onions are robust once caramelised, I know, but the perfect poise of this creamy filling is light and delicate. It also suggests alternatives to its purity: some leeks, some truffle salt, perhaps (every now and then) some bacon. Or, in optimistic honour of the coming warmth, vine-ripened tomatoes and flecks of freshly ground pepper. Perfect for lunch with a fresh green salad.
Caramelised Onion & Tomato Tart
adapted from Claudia Roden's Tarte aux Oignons d'Alsace
For the pastry:
125g unsalted butter
250g plain flour
1/4 tsp salt
1 egg, lightly beaten
1-2 tbsp milk (if required)
For the filling:
1 large onion
25g butter
2 tbsp sunflower or light vegetable oil
salt
2 tbsp plain flour
250 ml light double cream
2 eggs, lightly beaten
white pepper
2 ripe tomatoes
salt & freshly ground black pepper
To make the pastry: cut the butter into small pieces and rub it into the flour and salt with your hands. Add the egg, mix well, and work very briefly with your hand until bound into a soft sough, adding a little milk if necessary. Cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.
To make the filling: cut the onion in half, then into thick slices. Heat the butter with the oil in a large pan and cook the onion over very low heat and with the lid on for about 1 hour, or until very soft and lightly coloured, stirring occasionally and adding a little salt. Now add the flour and stir well. Beat the cream into the eggs. Let the onions cool a little before sirring into the cream mixture. Taste before adding a tiny bit of salt if necessary and pepper. The tart should not be too salty.
Preheat the oven to 300 Fahrenheit / 150 Celsius / gas oven 2.
Slice the tomatoes 1/2 a centimetre thick, place the slices to drain on a paper towel, and sprinkle with a little salt.
Line a greased 25cm tart pan or rectangular tart mould with the dough by pressing it in with the palms of your hands (easier to do with this soft dough than to roll it out) and pressing it up the sides. Pour in the creamy filling, then top with tomato slices. Bake for 1 hour, or until set and golden. Serve hot or cold, with freshly ground black pepper.
A winter salad for these final weeks of an epic season: sweet carrots, crisp cabbage and green onions with a simple soy and lime dressing. To the original dressing recipe, I added a drop of sesame oil and about 1/8 of a teaspoon of tamarind paste. The result is, I suppose, a cleaner, tarter species of coleslaw. I don't naturally incline toward salad on a winter's night, but this one left me optimistic about spring.
Cabbage & Carrot Salad
from Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything
1 lb cabbage (the recipe calls for Napa or Savoy, but I used plain green), cored and shredded
2 carrots, peeled and grated
2 or 3 scallions (green/spring onions), minced
1/4 to 1/3 cup peanut oil
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice
1 tsp soy sauce
Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Combine the vegetables. Whisk together the oil, lime juice, and soy; taste and add salt and pepper if necessary. Toss the dressing with the vegetables and serve.
Mushrooms under glass were all the rage in the early 20th century. I first read about them in Mary McCarthy's novel The Group, in which a coterie of Vassar graduates trip through 1930s New York drinking cocktails called Clover Cup and Silver Fizz. Intrigued, I found them again (via google) in a 1918 novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart, memorably titled 'Twenty-Three and a Half Hours' Leave'. (The frontispiece of this novel is an image captioned with the words: 'In the elevator she said out of a clear sky: "You'll have to take that raincoat off, of course".') In Rinehart's book, a general eats his mushrooms under glass with broiled squab at "the best restaurant in the city".
The basic recipe is a circle of toasted bread topped with mushrooms, butter and cream. This assemblage is covered by a glass dish and cooked slowly in a low oven. 'How to Cook Vegetables' (1909), by the uncannily named Olive Green, offers four Mushrooms Under Glass recipes: with parsley butter and a little cream; with stems fried in salt, pepper and nutmeg; with nothing but fresh uncooked mushrooms; and with pre-sautéed mushrooms. 'The French Chef in Private American Families' (1922), by Xavier Raskin, recommends mushrooms of the Campestris variety, and suggests one large mushroom cap upended on the toast and stuffed with its stem, butter and cream.
I don't know when mushrooms under glass fell out of fashion. Maybe it had something to do with being able to reproduce a similar effect with aluminium foil, or even in a microwave. But the theatrical whimsy of the dish appealed to me, and I knew where I could buy some cheap glass butter dish covers.
I updated the recipe with goat cheese rather than cream and mixed thyme and lemon in with the butter. Make sure you use thick-cut bakery or homemade bread for the crouton base: thin, spongy supermarket bread won't hold up. You need to be very careful when cooking with glass because abrupt changes in temperature can cause it to shatter. Don't preheat your oven, and don't place the dishes too close to the heating element. When you remove the glass covers from the dish, don't place them on anything too hot or too cold.
The result is something like serving your guests very, very good mushrooms on toast. The mushroom flavour intensifies with the slow cooking, but the mushrooms remain shapely and firm. This means that very ordinary button or white mushrooms will work perfectly: the long cooking time gives their flavour a chance to shine. The herb butter and mushroom juices keep the bread moist in the oven, so it still tastes just-toasted when you bring it to the table. The best part is removing the glass cover in front of your guests: the aroma of mushrooms, previously trapped under the dish, rises suddenly with the steam. It's like an earthy, rich terrarium of yum.
An ebay search for bell jars, glass cloches and glass butter dish covers shows how expensive these things can be. These garden cloches from Smith & Hawkin would be dramatic piled high with mushrooms. Keep an eye out for glass covers in thrift stores - I bought mine at a local antique store for $2 each. Xavier Raskin offers this hint for those dealing with larger Private American Families: "If more convenient use one large bell oven glass, arranging all the mushrooms as above under the one bell glass."
Mushrooms Under Glass
Serves 4
12 medium-sized button/white mushrooms
4 tbsp unsalted butter, softened
1 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tsp fresh thyme leaves
salt and freshly ground black pepper
4 thick slices of bread
40g / 1.5oz firm goat cheese
Remove the stalks from the mushrooms. Chop stalks finely.
Using a fork, mash the thyme leaves, lemon juice and a little salt and pepper into the softened butter.
Cut out rounds of bread to the size of your glass cover. Toast bread. Spread one side with herb butter and place the bread, buttered side down, on a baking dish or plate. Spread more butter on top of the bread rounds. By this time you should have used about 3/4 of the butter.
Mix the chopped mushroom stalks in with the remainder of the butter, and then stuff each mushroom cap with these buttery stalks. Arrange 3 caps on each piece of toast. Crumble goat cheese over the mushrooms. Add salt and pepper generously.
Place glass covers over each round. Place the baking dishes/plates in the oven. Set the temperature to 200°F/100°C (do not pre-heat oven). Cook for 40 minutes. Serve immediately, removing glass covers at the table.
There is a restaurant in Sydney called Mother Chu's Taiwanese Gourmet. It's an unassuming place, almost clinical (except for the bright red lanterns hanging from the eaves), and serves food that's quickly made and eaten. It sits on Dixon St, the main pedestrianised street of Sydney's inner-city Chinatown, which lacks the atmosphere it used to have before good Chinese food was available in unexpected neighbourhoods all over the city, like Hurstville and Burwood.
The thing that most distinguishes Mother Chu's is the spring onion pancake: a hot, flaky cake that releases steam with every bite and delivers, along with the flavours of oil and salt, an intense taste of diced spring onions.
When I say spring onions, I mean the long, slender stalks that are basically the same length the entire way, but begin firm and white at the root and end in thin green tubes. I'm being specific because spring onions confuse me, name-wise. In Australia we call them spring onions, but when I moved to England I discovered that spring onions were the ones with swelling white bulbs at the ends. I switched to the UK term, green onions, because it seemed so sensibly to refer to the object it named. Then I moved to America and found they were called scallions, a name I like because it implies a slightly mischevious character.
Figure 1: rolling & coiling the doughNow that I live in a small town in New Hampshire, a very long way from Mother Chu's, I have to make my own green onion pancakes, and I do that using this recipe from the wonderful blog Tigers & Strawberries. The result isn't quite the same - you can watch Mother Chu's nimble-fingered chefs roll paper-thin, perfect pancakes at the front of the restaurant, and theirs are larger, thicker and flakier than mine - but it's the closest I can manage in snowy New England.
The recipe has a lot of stages. The various rollings-out and shapings are all necessary to create the oily-yet-flaky texture, so that the pastry tears irregularly when you pull the pancake apart. My flakiest pancakes were the ones in which I did as little rolling as possible after the final coil of dough. Less handling keeps the air pockets intact.
I made only one third of the Tigers & Strawberries dough recipe, yielding 8 pancakes.
Green Onion Pancakes
from Tigers & Strawberries
1 cup flour
1/3 cup hot water
1/2 bunch green onion (spring onion/scallion) tops, sliced thinly
1/2 tsp sesame oil
salt and ground pepper mixed together
peanut oil for frying
waxed paper
Put flour in a medium sized mixing bowl, and add water all at once. Mix until most of the flour is mixed in, though the dough will seem quite dry.
At this point, lightly flour or oil your hands and turn dough out onto a silpat or a lightly floured surface and knead for about ten minutes until a very nice, smooth dough is formed. Wash out your bowl, dry it carefully, and put the dough ball back into the bowl. Cover it tightly and allow it to rest for at least thirty minutes.
Put sesame oil in a small bowl, and salt and pepper together in another small bowl and green onions in a third small bowl.
When your dough has finished resting, take it out and roll out into a long snake shape, about one inch or so thick. Cut the snake in half, then cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces.
Roll each lump of dough into a round and flatten slightly. Put all of them back into the bowl and cover, except for the one you're working with.
Take your flattened disk of dough and using a rolling pin, roll it into a circle, about 1/8 of an inch thick. Dip two fingers into the sesame oil, smear the surface of your rolled out dough with it. Sprinkle a pinch of salt and pepper over the surface of it, and then take up a scan’t 1/2 teaspoon of green onion slices and scatter over it.
Then, lift up the edge of the dough circle closest to you and roll it up like a cigar. Pinch the seam down the long side closed, and pinch the ends closed.
Now take the rolled up dough and make a snail-shaped disk out of it by coiling it on itself. Pinch the seams closed, then flatten it with the heel of your hand into a disk.
Next, take up the rolling pin and roll it into a flat pancake. Set the pancake on a piece of waxed paper and lay another piece of paper down over it. Repeat until all of your lumps of dough are used up.
Heat a shallow layer of peanut oil in a shallow frying pan until the oil bubbles when you put a bamboo chopstick’s tip in it. Slide in as many pancakes as the pan will hold and fry about a minute or so, or until golden brown on the bottom, then flip it over and cook until done on the other side–about forty-five seconds or so. When done, drain on paper towels. Repeat as necessary. Serve hot.
