Fête du Fromage: Port Salut and a Tart

My November entry to Chez Loulou's Fête du Fromage event is a fabulous Port Salut cheese - soft, mild yet distinct, and a great melter. This is my first experience with Port Salut and it couldn't be more fabulous. I tried a bit plain but I wanted to do a recipe as well, so I tried this tart from BBC Food, specifically James Tanner. The crust is a bit simple and a bit less than fabulous, but the topping is very tasty. The Port Salut matches quite well with the sweet onions and the red pepper, and the basil is a nice touch. I recommend going heavy on the olive oil because the crust is quite dry. The edges of the tart were almost inedible, but the center was great. Next time I would spread the filling nearly to the edges. Also it looks small, but I got four servings out of it.

Double Vegetarian Event Entry Time

All right, folks. You have a week to get those entries in to me, and I'm very excited that we have several participants this round so far who are neither me nor my mother. In the spirit of vegetarian blogging, I'm entering this post both in my own event as a second entry (because I had to do something with the other half of the puff pastry box) and in Eat the Right Stuff's Vegetables, Beautiful Vegetables event for the UK's national vegetarian week. So if anyone is coming from that event and wants to enter a vegetarian quiche, tart, or savoury pie (cross-posts are welcome!) just comment with the link to your post by Saturday, May 31st. We'd love to have you!

So, on with my experiment. I must admit, a lot went wrong with this recipe. It was still tasty, but not at all what I'd envisioned, and a little frustrating, especially considering how much I spent on all the ingredients. I found a recipe for caramelized vegetable tart at Meeta's blog. I know from others that Meeta has great recipes, and I read her blog regularly, so I'm sure the recipe would work just fine in more capable hands, but man, I just had all the mishaps. One major issue was the fennel. You see me here, charmingly displayed behind its fronds, but the fennel became much less fun after that. I've never tasted it before, and I found that the smaller pieces that got nice and soft tasted fine, but the majority of slices - perhaps because I couldn't figure out just how to slice it - were crunchy and had an odd, bitter taste.

I also had a problem with the pastry, in that I used wax paper (maybe parchment is different, I've never known) and when I pulled it a way, and sizeable chunk of pastry came with it. Thankfully, there was still plenty, but I was a bit annoyed. Next, I toasted the pinenuts in the toaster oven and managed to burn them to a crisp. I have to stop toasting nuts in that thing. I'll never learn. Those were the last of my supply, so no pinenuts. Then the veggies just wouldn't cook fully. I don't know if they were too crowded in the pan, and therefore had trouble browning - next time, I'm using smaller veggies - or if the heat was just too low, but I had to crank it up to medium to make anything happen. After 25 minutes, they never really browned or caramelized, so I gave up. Everything but the fennel was cooked, at least, but I expected more browning in the broiler. After two minutes, the cheese was still blinding white and the pastry was dangerously dark. I gave up. Tasty, but not exactly a success. Better luck next time?

I had a similar opinion of my dessert offering this weekend, which was a coconut panna cotta from La Tartine Gourmande, one of my favourite bloggers. The process itself was blissfully easy, with only a few ingredients and little advanced technique involved. I picked it because I needed a use for the remainder of the buttermilk from the carton I purchased for a challenge you'll see next week. Apparently, though, my tastes just cannot handle cold buttermilk. Really, I knew this. I'm not the kind of Southerner who can drink buttermilk straight. I wince a bit, and it's an unpleasant experience. I like it in baked goods, but for some reason it didn't occur to me that the buttermilk flavour would be so strong here. I thought it would blend with the coconut somehow and not really be noticeable. I do think it would be tastier with the blackberry stew on that post, because some fruit to cut the buttermilk would be perfect, but as it is I'm probably throwing the rest away. Oh, well.

My AVF #3 Contribution: Green Tomato Tarte Tatin

Unfortunately, the next couple of posts are going to be light on the photography (and the photographic quality). I went to upload thirty two recent photos and foolishly deleted the photos from my camera before checking to make sure they all uploaded. My camera has been having trouble with turning itself mid-upload lately, and it apparently did that this time. So all but seven photos are gone, including the beautiful coconut creams in martini glasses that I had to re-shoot in a less-impressive orange bowl. At least with the creams I had one left - the delicious tarte tatin disappeared more quickly, and so I have to stick with what blurry photos I have. Unfortunately, no photos of the finished product on the jam puffs I made with the leftover pastry, either.

Anyway. This is my contribution to AVF, so first a quick reminder that entries are due May 31st! You still have a couple of weeks, but those couple of weeks can fly by! Send your savoury tart, quiche, and pie recipes to me via e-mail to judithavory@gmail.com or in a comment to any post. We've got three so far, and I'd love to have a couple more!

Now, on with the subject of this post: green tomato tarte tatin. A few years ago, when I was deeply enamoured of Charleston, I had big plans to go to Tate Business School at UGA and open my own little cafe/bookshop/music performance space in downtown Charleston, called De Bon Goût (in good taste, in French). There were no independent bookstores in Charleston at the time, only a Waldenbooks, and this bothered me greatly. I would offer alternative titles (feminism, lots of poetry, LGBT stuff, etc) and have five or six little tables where I would serve food made with fresh Southern ingredients, but cooked in a French style. Though the idea quickly fell through, this attempt is my homage to that dream.

When I found tons of delicious, bright green tomatoes at the Farmer's Market last weekend, I knew I had to use them in my tart recipe. I had been thinking of doing something with puff pastry, because it's so easy if you pony up the cash for the store-bought variety, and in the back of my mind I had an idea of doing something like a tarte tatin, the classic French apple pastry. Well, lo and behold, someone had already come up with that idea! So I went with this recipe, with a few variations.

First I rolled the pastry out and cut the circle you see here to fit my small cast-iron skillet. It was the one thing I knew was definitely ovenproof. However, it's only about six inches on the bottom, so I had plenty of leftover dough. Not wanting to waste any pastry, I cut it into irregular squares and plopped blobs of the last of the fig and ginger chutney on top, as well as one with strawberry jam. They were super easy - just pinch up into little cases and bake at 400 for 15 minutes or so. The filling is very, very hot though, so be warned!

Anyway, as for the tarte itself, it went well and was super tasty, but I would recommend using a larger pan (I would even say ten inches, not eight). I used only four tomatoes, and lopped the ends off, but they still didn't fit in the pan. I made two layers, which meant that the butter and sugar all collected at the bottom and the tomatoes closest to the pastry, didn't really caramelize. Still, it worked well and I was able to scoop some of the sugary juices over the top. I didn't bother with the red onion, and I think the sour cream thing is overkill, but the oil and vinegar is a good idea to drizzle on top. For the second tasting, I got a special treat, because Rita brought back a bottle of her dad's homemade green tomato wine from Alabama. It was fantastic! I had no idea you could make wine with something other than grapes, and of course you can't come up with a pairing better than this one.