Easy as Cherry Pie

A bit later than promised but here it is:
Two weeks ago on Saturday, it was the world's best flatmate's birthday. A quarter of a century old and, may I assure you, she (also affectionately known as Puschel, though only by me) doesn't look a day over 21.
And what better present to give to her than a cookbook. This one to be precise. It's the bakery-related volume of a (I think) two volume cookbook of healthy fast food recipes all wrapped up in pretty pictures and graphics and a very hipster-y layout. A few weeks ago, Puschel came home with the first volume and when she continued raving about how great it was and how great the second volume was, too, the issue of her birthday present was resolved before it had even really come up. Maybe that was her plan all the way. She must've known that I wouldn't be able to resist giving her a cookbook, especially if it was one she specifically wanted. She knows me so well. Sometimes even too well. It's spooky. And not a topic of relevance here.

Balsamic onion and goat's cheese galette

And yet another recipe that undeservedly had to wait for quite some time until it was published. I don't really know why. I really liked it because, well, honestly, what's not to like? It contains five of my alltime favourite ingredients which are fried onions, balsamic vinegar, goat's cheese, white wine and puff pastry, aaand it's a very quick recipe, too, which is always an advantage.

 

This would be perfect on a warm summer's night on a balcony overlooking Paris, with a glass of Bordeaux in your hand and your favourite person next to you. Failing that, your kitchen and some French music from the stereo will do, too.

Balsamic onion and goat's cheese galette
Serves 1

3 rectangular sheets of puff pastry
150 g/0.6 cups soft goat's cheese
3 large onions (i used 2 red and a white one)
1 egg
1 Tbsp Crema di balsamico
Some white wine
A few rosemary twigs
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Chop the onions. Heat some oil in a frying pan and fry the onions until soft and translucent. Add a pinch of salt and pepper and the crema di balsamico (you can also use regular balsamic vinegar). Give it a good stir, then remove from heat.

Preheat your oven to 200° C/390° F.

On a flat surface, roll out the puff pastry until you have a round disk about 30 cm/12 inches in diameter. Transfer it to a baking tray. Crumble the goat's cheese onto the pastry, leaving some space around the edges for folding. Put the onions on top and fold in the edges. Brush the edges with egg wash and pour some white wine over the filling.

Pop it into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes.


If it were physically and legally possible to marry a dish, this would be the one. (Although I would frequently cheat on it, starting at the wedding banquet. But I would always come back.)

East Coast Pot Pie

As far as I can tell pot pies are something very American. At least I had never heard of them before when I encountered them all over the American food blogs on Tastespotting. But, oh, did I fall in love!

I'm already a sucker for open pies but top them with a lid of pastry and I'm in heaven. Even more so if they're made in cute little individual pots. Awwww!

So, last week their time had finally come. We had some mushrooms and prawns left over that had to be eaten, and I was in charge of dinner. (Errm, to be honest: I put myself in charge of dinner by chasing everybody who wanted to help out of the kitchen. Everybody being my mum.) Pot pie, here I come (or you, depending on the point of view. But that is beside the point. I'm babbling. Again).

It's not like I've ever been to a beach on the American East Coast (or anywhere on the East Coast, for that matter) but this pie tastes exactly like what I imagine an afternoon there to feel like. It tastes like a fresh breeze with a hint of sea and salt, like summer holidays, long, sunny days, and some lazy hours on the veranda of a pastel-coloured wooden house overlooking the sea. And that's why I named it East Coast Pot Pie. Feel free to give it another name if you wish to do so.

They looked very promising, coming out of the oven, all golden and crusty. But then hacking one's fork into the crust, cracking it open, and being hit by that heavenly smell of the filling... ... oh my god, it was heaven! Grade: A+. Do come again.

East Coast Pot Pie

(Recipe for the crust loosely based on one by Naturally Ella)

75 g/3/4 cup flour (wholewheat or all-purpose)

6 Tbsp butter

2 Tbsp curd

2 egg yolks

A generous pinch of salt

A generous pinch of sugar

2 shallots

Half a clove of garlic

8-10 button mushrooms

Half a lemon

180 g/0.5-0.75 cup prawns (cooked)

100 g/0.5 cup feta cheese

A generous glug of white wine

0.5 bunch of dill

Salt

Pepper

Olive oil

First, make the pastry: Put flour, salt and sugar in a food processor (or a blender or whatever). Cut in the butter and pulse until you have a crumbly substance. Put that into a medium bowl, add the curd and the egg yolks, and knead into a smooth dough, adding more butter or flour if necessary. Wrap the dough in cling foil and refridgerate.

Chop the shallots, the mushrooms, and the dill. Mince the garlic. Heat the olive oil in a pan and fry the shallots and garlic until translucent. Turn up the heat, add the mushrooms and a pinch of salt, and fry for another few minutes, then add the prawns. Continue frying until the mushrooms are almost done, then deglaze with a healthy glug of white wine. Squeeze in the lemon juice, then take the pan of the heat, add the dill, crumble in the feta cheese and give it a good stir.

Preheat the oven to 200° C/400° F.

Remove the pastry from the fridge and divide it into thirds. Take two small pie pots, line each with a third of the pastry, then add half of the filling to each. Make the remaining pastry into two disks, put one on each pot. Now you can either brush the crust with olive oil or forget it like the blithering idiot that I am.

Bake for 25-35 minutes, then serve with some fresh cucumber and a glass of white wine.

Blair Waldorf Must Pie!

Before we get to all the christmas-y stuff I still have one recipe to post that is connected with a holiday that's not Christmas, but ... Thanksgiving! If you haven't spent all your life in a cave, you know that Thanksgiving always falls on the fourth Thursday in November, and that was last week. We don't really celebrate Thanksgiving in Germany but I'll be damned if I pass up on a holiday that gives me an excuse to bake something as delicious as Pumpkin Pie.

This year's pie is even better than last year's, and that's saying something...!

 Pumpkin Pie
(Recipe by flour and butter)

170 g/1.5 cups flour
0.5 tsp salt
0.5 cups butter
60-120 ml/0.25-0.5 cups cold water
450 g/2 cups pumpkin puree
150 g/0.75 cups brown sugar
1.25 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
0.5 tsp salt
0.5 tsp cardamon
1 pinch nutmeg
0.25 tsp ground cloves
4 eggs
360 ml/1.5 cups single/light cream

Cut up the butter. Mix flour and salt in a medium bowl, then add the butter. Add a little of the cold water and knead until you have a slightly sticky dough, adding more water or flour if necessary. Wrap up the dough and put in the fridge for at least an hour.

Preheat the oven to 200° C/400° F, then take the dough out of the fridge, roll it out and put it in a pie tin. (If you're as lazy as me you can skip the rolling out, just put the dough in the pie tin and squish it around until the tin is lined.) Line with aluminium foil and pre-bake for about 15 minutes.

In the meantime, combine the pumpkin, brown sugar, cinnamon, ginger, salt, cardamon, nutmeg, and cloves in a large bowl. Add eggs and beat lightly for a few minutes, then add the cream and combine.

Take the pie tin with the pre-baked crust out of the oven, remove the foil, and pour in the filling. Then cover the tin with foil again and put it back into the oven. Be careful, the filling is very, very thin. I had some filling left over which I poured into a smaller tin and baked with the pie. Served hot, it makes a delicious pudding!

Bake for 20 minutes, then remove the foil and bake for another 25-35 minutes. It's done when a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean.

Let it cool, then cut into slices and eat, preferably while watching the Thanksgiving episode from the first series of Gossip Girl.

Apple and Camembert tart or "Pass the butter, please!"

I know, the combination sounds quite weird but this is an a-ma-zing dish. Really. Very. Incredibly. Good. 

When I stumbled across it on Tastespotting, it was a Brie and Pear tart. My mum went into fits of laughter when I told her the story of me making this recipe (hello, mummy!) as I started with "I found this brilliant recipe for a Pear and Brie tart!" and then started listing all the things I changed about it which was basically everything (I kept the sugar, the oven temperature and the baking time, though): I couldn't find any organic brie so I bought camembert (experts, please don't hit me, but is there any difference between brie and camembert besides the region of origin and the size? They're both the same to me...), I didn't have any pears left so I substituted apples (holstein cox, to be precise. I didn't know that variety before but now that I know them, I've decided that they are the best apples in the entire universe. They taste like sherbet. Fabulous.) and I was too lazy and too stingy to buy pear schnapps so I ended up using cherry brandy (there was some left over from the gingerbread project a few weeks ago). And I didn't really like the sweet almond pie crust, so I made a different, more neutral one.

Sorry for the picture. There's no natural light in our kitchen, so almost all the pictures I take in there turn out absolutely awful. (And the tart just smelt so good, I didn't have the patience to bustle around for minutes, trying to get a remotely good shot.)

The whole thing tastes very french. The apples, the camembert, the crust. Oh my, the crust! It's very buttery, but in the best of ways. Come to think of it: Is there even a bad way of being buttery? Or to put it this way: "Is there anything better than butter? Think it over. Every time you taste something that's delicious beyond imagining, and you say, What is in this?, the answer is always going to be butter. The day there's a meteorite heading toward the earth and we have 30 days to live, I am going to spend it eating butter. Here's my final word on the subject: You can never have too much butter." Absolutely never. I have to agree with Julie Powell here. (The quote's from the Julie & Julia film. You don't know it? Go watch it! Chop chop!)

Where was I? Oh yes, butter! And where do we find the most buttery, tasty, delicious, wonderful dishes? In France, of course. Buttery pastry always tastes like France. Always. I'm not a francophile. I would like to be but I'm not. I love the music, the food (the menus, the pastry!), the wine, and the landscapes and towns, but I don't get along with the people. Shame. Well, at least I can have the music, the wine and the food without going to France. I'm babbling, sorry. Back to the tart.

It looks amazing, it smells amazing, it tastes amazing. The only thing I couldn't decide on is what kind of dish this tart actually is, or rather when to eat it. Is it something you can have for supper? Is it a pudding? Or a kind of cake you can have for tea? If you ask me, it's neither. But it is absolutely delicious, so just make it and eat a slice (or two or three, if you're a glutton like me) whenever the whim takes you.

Apple and Camembert tart

(inspired by A spicy perspective, recipe for crust adapted from Simply recipes)

Makes for 1 tart

For the crust: 

150 g/1.25 cups all-purpose flour

115 g/0.5 cup unsalted butter, very-cold, cut into 1 cm/1/2 inch cubes

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

3 to 4 Tbsp ice water

For the filling:

200 g camembert

3-4 apples

50 g/0.25 cup sugar

1.5 Tbsp calvados (is certainly better than my cherry brandy)

Salt

Preheat the oven to 200 °C/400° F.

Combine flour, salt, and sugar. Add butter and mix until you've got a crumbly substance resembling oatmeal. Add ice water 1 Tbsp at a time, checking after each addition if the dough holds together. If it doesn't, add a little more water. Put in the fridge for at least an hour (recipe says. I didn't do it).

Grease a tart form. Now you have two options: You can roll out the dough into a disk and then line the tart form with it, or you can just put the lump of dough in the form and press and squish and push it around until the form is lined. I always go for the latter option because it's less work and I'm lazy.

Put it in the oven to prebake the crust.

In the meantime, core the apples and cut them and the camembert into very, very thin slices.

In a small bowl, combine the calvados and the sugar.

Remove the tart form from the oven. Cover the bottom of the tart with camembert (it doesn't matter if it starts to melt). Cover the camembert with a layer of overlapping apple slices, then spread the calvados sugar mixture on top and sprinkle with salt.

Bake for 30-40 minutes (the cheese should bubble up and the crust should be a brownish gold), then let it cool for 10 or so minutes. 

Eat with a cup of strong black coffee or a glass of wine while listening to George Brassens.

I have no idea how long it keeps since I ate it within two days (almost on my own).