Recipe For Onion Tart (That Promises To Make You Weep With Joy)

Yeah, I was totally sold on the concept of baking something that would make me "weep with joy" when I saw the recipe for onion tart in my weekly Abel and Cole box. And while it turned out there were no actual tears, it still tasted damn good.

Here's what you need for the pastry: 170g plain white flour, 70g unsalted butter, 1 beaten egg, plus sea salt. And for the filling, you'll need 3 large white onions (sliced finely), 50g unsalted butter, 1 tsp caster sugar, 2 egg yolks, 150ml half‐fat créme fraîche, a handful of fresh thyme leaves, and freshly ground black pepper.

To make the pastry, rub the butter into the flour and salt until it resembles breadcrumbs. Add the beaten egg and a small amount of cold water (around 2-3 tablespoons) and mix until you have a soft dough. Place into a bowl, cover, and chill in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Next up, melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed pan. Add the onions and sugar, and cook very slowly over a low heat with the lid on for 30 minutes. Then add the thyme leaves.

Once the dough has finished chilling, roll it out and place into a lightly buttered tart tin. Having just watched the Jamie's Kitchen episode where Kerryann's chocolate tarts all get stuck to the tins cos she buttered but didn't flour them, I dusted some flour around the tin as well and it worked a treat. The recipe from Abel and Cole suggested a 20cm tin, but mine was 30cm and it worked just fine. Place a circle of greaseproof paper on top of the dough, cover it with baking beans (or regular large dried beans) and bake at 180 degrees Celcius for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, and discard the beans and paper.

By the way, I have no clue what this business with the beans is supposed to accomplish, but I am nothing if not obedient, even though it feels like a fairly bonkers thing to do.

While the pastry is baking, mix the egg yolks with the créme fraîche and some pepper. Drain any fat off the onions, spoon into the pastry case and spread the egg mix across the top. I added some grated parmesan at this stage on the grounds that cheese improves literally everything. Turn the oven up to 190 degrees Celcius and bake for 25-30 minutes until golden on top.

This tart tasted fantastic warm from the oven - and even better cold the next day. Serve with new potatoes and salad, or maybe just rive it out of the pan with your bare hands, as the mood takes you. Abel and Cole think it should serve six people but there's no way I'm sharing something this good with five other peeps. So I'd say it will feed two at a pinch, but only if you really, really like the other person.

What have you cooked recently?

Oh, and if anyone can come up with a foodstuff that would not be improved by the addition of cheese, then I'd love to hear about it :-)

Recipe for French Nectarine and Crème Fraîche Cake

A while back I purchased a rather marvellous French cookery book called New Bistro, based on a review from The Beat That My Heart Skipped, one of my favourite design blogs. It includes lovely bistro recipes from various parts of France, and is kind of a cross between a recipe book and a French travel guide, with some wonderful photography. The first recipe I cooked from this book was a most delicious Nectarine and Crème Fraîche cake - here's how things went down.

You'll need 115g butter, 115g brown sugar, 2 eggs, 5 tbsp crème fraîche, 200g nectarines (apricots, cherries and peaches would also work well), 125g self raising flour, 1/4 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp nutmeg:

Blend the butter and sugar together until evenly mixed. Add the eggs and beat enthusiastically. Then add the crème fraîche and mix well.

Chop the nectarines and add them to the batter:

Quickly fold in the flour and baking powder until smooth, and then transfer to an 8 inch cake tin:

Dust with nutmeg, and then bake in the oven at 180 degrees Celcius for 25-30 minutes. The cake will be ready when you can stick a fine skewer into the centre and it comes out clean.

The cake has a lovely dense, moist texture - and thanks to the crème fraîche it has a lovely sweet tang. Great with a mid-morning espresso or a late afternoon glass of Prosecco!

Have you tried any new recipes lately?

How To Make Pizza In Less Time Than It Takes To Get A Take-Away

I can pinpoint the precise moment when I started to become very fussy aware of the food that I eat. Andre and I had decided to treat ourselves to a nice Tesco Finest Four Cheese pizza for dinner, as neither of us could be bothered to cook. Having popped it into the oven, I idly flipped over the cardboard packaging, where my eye fell upon the list of ingredients.

Contains: Gorgonzola, cheddar, parmesan, mozzerella, cheese flavouring....

Um, pardonnez-moi? Cheese flavouring? On a four-cheese pizza? Why, pray tell, is it necessary to add cheese flavouring to a pizza that is literally festooned with cheese?

It would be nice to round off this story by saying that I immediately pulled the pizza from the oven, tossed it into the bin with a shudder of horror, and went out to buy some nice organic sausages or something instead - but hey, we were starving, so we ate it anyway, and it tasted great.

But shortly after that, we started gradually switching all our food to organic, cutting out all processed food, tearing up the take-away menus, interrogating the unsuspecting local butcher Jamie Oliver-style... fast-forward to a year later, and all our fruit, vegetables, meat and fish are delivered from Abel and Cole, I would never dream of ordering in a take-away and if we ever fancy having a pizza, well, I just make one. Here's how.

There are dozens of ways to make pizza dough, and usually I alternate between various recipes depending on how much time I have (good ol' Jamie has one in Jamie's Italy that only calls for 15 mins rising time, for example). The following recipe is taken from The Food of Italy.

Mix one dessert spoon of caster sugar, one 7g packet of yeast, and 45ml warm water. Leave for 5 mins to activate. Meanwhile, put 225g of plain flour, a pinch of salt, and two table spoons of olive oil into a bowl. Add the yeast mixture, and start mixing with a fork. Gradually add around 60ml warm water - do this slowly, mixing as you go along - don't just dump it all in at once cos you probably won't need it all, and you'll end up with a big ol' sticky mess.

Once the mixture has become too dense to mix with your fork, turn it out onto a floured surface and knead it for five minutes, adding more water or flour as required, until you have a firm, springy dough that is not sticky.

Rub the inside of a bowl with olive oil. Roll your dough ball around the inside of the bowl to lightly coat it in oil, score a shallow cross in the top of the bowl with a sharp knife, cover the bowl, and leave it in a warm place for 1-1.5 hours.

While the dough is rising, make your tomato sauce. I usually sauté some chopped garlic and basil leaves in olive oil, chuck in a tin of chopped tomatoes, add a splash of balsamic vinegar, and then leave to simmer for 15-20 mins over a low heat.

Once the dough has risen, punch it down to the original size. Roll it out on a floured surface to around 0.5cm deep, and transfer to a baking tray. This amount of dough should make a pizza around 15 inches in diameter - and you can always freeze any left-over dough.

Brush the crust in olive oil, and spoon the tomato sauce over the entire base. Add whatever toppings you feel like (I used parma ham - probably cos we didn't have anything else in the fridge at the time), and arrange a sliced up mozzerella ball over the surface. I also grated some parmesan over the top.

Cook in the centre of a 220 degrees Celcius oven for around 20 minutes. Depending on how ferocious your oven is, how thinly you rolled out the base, and how crispy you like the topping and the crust  to be, you may need a little longer or a little shorter, so keep an eye on it.

The final product - yummy. Nice n crispy. And if you have pizza dough and tomato sauce in the freezer (which I usually do, cos I always make double amounts) then you can get a homemade pizza on the table in under 30 minutes, which is less time than it would take for a take-away pizza to arrive. And no cheese flavouring in sight, thanks very much.

Any other take-away/randomly unnecessary artificial ingredient haters out there? Do tell :-)