Leek Tart (Tarte aux Poireaux)

Unlike in New Zealand where 'real men don't eat quiche', French men are only too happy to enjoy quiches and tarts and Tarte au Poireaux is one of Luc's favourite meals. His mum whips up great tarts in no time using store bought pastry and a custardy base made of eggs and creme fraiche. Unfortunately for countries like NZ and esp Australia, the store-bought pastries there are usually rubbish so it's well worth making your own - which is fairly quick if you multitask and get another step done while pastry is chilling. Creme fraiche is also not widely available and very expensive in any case, so while living in Australia, we started making this version, with recipes for a savoury custard and a shortcrust pastry (I made wholemeal) from Perth wholefood chef Jude Blereau. They both come from her book 'Wholefood: heal, nourish, delight' which is a great resource book for getting back to basics and tips on preparing different ingredients. 

This recipe is for leek tart (tarte aux poireaux) which is simple but delicious. You can use the basic recipe to make other tarts with winter or summer roast vegetables, things like pumpkin and blue cheese, spinach and pine nuts etc. 'Wholefood' cookbook also has a version I'd like to try with sweet potato, caremelized onion and artichoke. So use the idea and have fun!

Please forgive this lacklustre photo - I didn't think to take one when it came out of the oven so this is of a leftover piece reheated (and thus pastry overcooked) which we had the next day with wholemeal garlic bread and orange & grilled fennel salad.

Leek Tart

Ingredients:

1 quantity (450g / 1 lb)shortcrust pastry - see recipe below
1 quantity of basic savoury custard - see recipe below
3 medium leeks, (hard green tops removed), well cleaned and chopped
1 T olive oil
optional:
2-4 t dijon mustard
⅓ c grated melting cheese like 'tasty', cheddar, gruyere or compte

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 200˚C (350˚F / Gas mark 4).
2. Line a 24cm (Diameter) x 3.5cm (Deep) / (9½ x 1¼ inch) tart dish with the pastry and trim the edges. (Tin or enamel tart dishes are best to transfer heat quickly to set gluten in pastry before butter all melts, while ceramic dishes diffuse heat which can result in soggier pastry). Put in the fridge for at least 20 minutes, or until well chilled (otherwise the pastry can slump down away from the sides while cooking and won't be nice and flakey).
3. While the pastry-shell is chilling, prepare the leeks. Make sure they are well-cleaned of any grit and dirt by slicing in half lengthways - so you can separate the leaves - and rinsing well in cold water. Sauté the leeks in the olive oil, stirring so they don't brown. When they are tender remove from heat.
4. Blind-bake the pastry-shell: Line the well chilled pastry shell with baking paper and fill with baking beans or raw rice. Put into the hot oven on the hot baking tray and bake blind for 15 minutes. Remove baking paper (being careful not to spill the beans / rice. These, once cool, can be stored and reused for future blind baking). Bake pastry-shell for a further 5 minutes or until the base of the pastry is dry.
5. While the pastry is blind baking you could prepare the savoury custard (see recipe below).
6. Next, we spread our ingredients (here, leek) over the base of the pastry-shell and pour over the custard, using only enough to bring the level to just below the top of the pastry. If using cheese and/or mustard, first use the back of a spoon to spread the mustard over the base of the tart then sprinkle over cheese before adding the leek. 
7. Carefully place the filled tart in the oven and bake for 15 minutes (at 200˚C / 400˚F / Gas 6) before turning down to 180˚C (350˚F / Gas 4) and check after a further 50 minutes (or earlier, if you think your oven is too hot or you're using a fanbake setting. The tart should be set and becoming golden on top. If you would like to top it with cheese, sprinkle over a good melting cheese approximately 20 minutes before it is ready (I don't feel the need to do that when I'm using tasty organic leeks).

Shortcrust Pastry (Wholemeal or plain)

125-180g (4 ½ - 6 oz) unsalted butter
250 g (9 oz / 2 cups) flour (wholemeal, atta or plain wheat or spelt)*
90-170 ml (3-5½ fl oz) ice-cold water

*Wholemeal flours require a wetter dough (as they absorb more liquid). You can choose to mix wholemeal and plain flour or wholemeal and atta flour if you like. I tend to use just one or the other, depending on what I'm making. With many savoury tarts I prefer the nutty flavour of wholemeal.

Method:

1. Using a pastry cutter / butter knife / your fingertips, cut the butter into the flour in the bowl until it is incorporated but still chunky (small chunks). If using a food processor, pulse one or two times, or until ready to turn out into a bowl.
2. Begin to mix the water gradually into the flour and butter (using a butter knife to cut the wet into the dry). Use only as much water as you need - the higher the percentage of wholemeal/whole wheat flour you use, the more water needed. Once the mixture looks evenly moist, bring it together into a ball (but don't knead or work it too much).
3. Flatten the ball of dough and chill for about 20 minutes, long enough to take the softness off the butter. The dough is now ready to roll out and use.

Basic Savoury Custard

Enough for a simple tart with few ingredients. The more ingredients you add, the less custard you will need.

For a 24cm (Diameter) x 3.5cm (Deep) / (9½ x 1¼ inch) Tart Dish

500ml (17 fl oz / 2 cups) milk (dairy or soy)

small sprig of fresh thyme or fresh oregano or green garlic (to infuse soy milk)

1 fresh bay leaf

1 garlic clove, quartered

sea salt, to taste

freshly ground black pepper, to taste

2 eggs

1 egg yolk

Put the milk in a saucepan (along with your choice of seasonings if using soy milk), the bay leaf and the garlic and place over a very low heat. Don't allow it to boil, but heat it until it just begins to steam. Remove from the heat, cover, then put in the fridge.

When cool, remove the skin (if there is one) and herb sprig (but not the leaves) and mash the garlic into the custard. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then whisk in the eggs.

Easy-As Pie

My favourite vegetables are technically fruit - tomatoes and eggplant. While I've been delighted by the cheapness and the year-long abundance of eggplants here in Perth, tomatoes are a different matter. Oh they're there all year - but even when it's the proper season for them - in the words of Nick Cave: "I think it's well understood, tomatoes, they just aint no good."

So ok, he was talking about people, not tomatoes, but if you know the song and its tone of lament, you'll get an idea about my feelings of disapointment in the tomatoes of today and my nostalgia for a time when they had taste. Like September. September we went to France and Luc's mum made tomato salad with large plump tomatoes from her garden. Yeah, that's RIGHT, WE remember, my taste-buds screamed, tomatoes used to taste like this! THIS is why you liked them - not their hard-to-cut smoothness, not their please-blanch-and-peel recipes nor their seeds nor their bitterness. It was TASTE, and taste is mostly why I love cooking and also red wine.

Half the reason I once moved to Chile was red wine, the other half was Pablo Neruda, a nobel prize-winning poet. And this is what he had to say about tomatoes:
Ode to Tomatoes

Sadly even with Perth's endless summer the tomatoes are mainly hard, pale and tasteless. But still I love them, I can't deny them, I'll always love them till the day that I die. So what to do? My garden having failed to produce any tomatoes (despite being quite good at growing tall tomato plants), I have settled for eating grape tomatoes if I want them fresh, or, as in this recipe, baking them to bring out the flavour - it really does WONDERS!

Sometimes I just cut them in half and stick them on a tray in the oven, but here I've made more substantial stuffed tomatoes. They are good with rice, wild rice and other grains too. Here I've used red quinoa - partly because it was there to be used, and partly because it's supposed to be a great protein source.





Stuffed Baked Tomatoes
1 large tomato per person
approx 1 T quinoa (prob still too much) per person
vegetable stock (liquid) enough to cover quinoa in pan/rice cooker
1 t per tomato of LSA mix (Linseed, Sunflower and Almond)
Scattering of your choice of fruit and nuts like:
-dates
-figs
-raisins
-currants
-pine nuts
-almonds
-walnuts
Sprinkling of spices like
-cinnamon
-sumac
-paprika
-allspice

Using steady hands and a knife you trust (small paring knives or those cheap $7 Victorinox ones are good) slice around the top of each tomato leaving a few cm uncut to act as a hinge for this tomato lid. Use a strong metal spoon to cut through the 'ribs' inside the tomato (the part anchoring all the seeds to the walls ). Scoop out the ribs and seeds so you are left with an empty bowl shell. (the insides can be stored and used later in a tomato sauce etc).
Put quinoa in a rice cooker, cover with liquid vegetable stock, turn on rice cooker and leave to do its thing. You'll know when quinoa is done because curly white tails appear and the quinoa won't be hard anymore). When the quinoa is cooked, mix in the fruit, nuts and spices (with a rice-cooker-safe tool of course!).

That's right, my tripod is not so smooth. I'll get a decent tripod one day, just you wait.

I also made one of Luc's favourites - Leek tart,


and a madeup invention, babaganoush pie. We had half an eggplant in the fridge so I roasted it in the oven till it turned black and the structure collapsed. This is a good thing. When you roast eggplant in the oven or over an open flame or BBQ, it becomes really soft (without having to fry in oil!) and best of all, it gets this delicious smoky flavour. All you do it when it's cooked is to peel the skin off (it comes off very nicely) and chop up the flesh into chunks and mix with some garlic, felafel spice mix and tahini and this will make a very nice small pie filling.