Spring tarte with May herbs

It’s been too long since I posted a pie recipe, I feel. Let me remedy that.

This pie is a recipe that I adapted from the medieval recipe for Torta of Herbs in the Month of May, and I think that it works just as well as a savoury entree or main dish as for a sweet dessert. Personally, I prefer the savoury version, substitute my own favourite herbs and reduce the sugar in it, so here’s my personal recipe:

Spring tarte

For the pie shell: 2 cups of flour and 1 cup of rolled oats, 150g (salted) butter, a dash of water.
Makes a standard pie shell, but the oats give the whole thing an interesting bite! If the dough doesn’t want to come together, add a bit more flour or reduce the amount of oats.

For the filling:
2-3 eggs (depending on size)
2Tsp. thick Turkish yoghurt
ca. 75g yellow cheese (Gouda works well)
1 big handful of fresh herbs of your choice, e.g.:
– Basil
– Mint
– Oregano
– Parsley
1tsp. honey.
Grind the cheese in the blender first, then add the rest of the ingredients and blend until the herbs are chopped fine. Pour out into your pre-baked pie crust and bake at 200C for ca. 20 minutes (or until done).
For a sweet variant add grated ginger and more honey/sugar, and perhaps replace the yoghurt and yellow cheese with some sort of fresh cheese or cream cheese.
Enjoy!

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Bento #356

I saw these the other day and just had to try making them for bento :) Sadly mine didn’t get as perfect – I shall have to work on my technique for not letting half the egg run out under the pepper, and I couldn’t let the yolk stay runny as it has to keep until tomorrow – but they certainly will be tasty!

Bulgur with spring onions, parsley, sundried tomatoes and bell pepper pieces, bell pepper ring with a fried egg inside and spring onion decoration, Brie poppers, grapes and “bamboo shoots” candy. More parsley as decoration.

BF’s box:

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Bento #350

Is this a real pie? Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a hunger dream, got no key for the pantry!
Open your eyes, just grab a slice and see…
I’m a poor Hobbit, I need pie regularly…
A little apple pie, cherry pie, mushroom pie, berry pie…
Any flavour really, it doesn’t really matter, to me, to me.

Um, I mean with summer almost gone and having let myself go a little by eating out way too much, I thought I’d get back into making bentos. Also, Chanterelles are in season again! Yay!
So I made a bunch of mushroom pie for freezing, and loaded up the lunchbox with some mixed lettuces, cherry tomatoes and a nasturtium flower.

Edit: Since so many asked, here’s the recipe I used (I mostly just winged it but here we go). It’s such a common thing to get here in Sweden I never thought anyone would be interested!

I made 2 big and one small pie, but I will adjust the sizes to about what I used for one of the big ones.
1 pie crust (I made my usual graham pie crust, in a pan about 24cm in diameter and 3cm high)
1 big handful (ca. 70g?) of mushrooms, cut into not-too-small pieces
1/2 (small) red onion, chopped
2 eggs
Olive oil or butter, dash of white wine, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper
Start with preheating the oven to 200 degrees Celsius (or if you have just blind baked your pie crusts, it will still be warm).
I asked the BF if I should pre-fry the stuffing and he enthusiastically agreed. Fried mushrooms just taste better! Also, they will no longer lose water when they are stuffed in the pie.
So I started with glazing the red onion in a pan with the butter and a little garlic, then added the mushrooms, parsley, salt and pepper. When they started to let out their water, I added the dash of white wine, took them off the heat and stirred in the eggs, then poured the whole mixture into the pie shell. It took about 15-20 minutes to bake in the oven at 200 degrees Celsius. Since it starts out warm this is quite quick!

“Ode to a stolen pie” is by me, made for a RP character.

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Bento #249

After this brief peanut-butter interlude, back to your normal bento programming.

I was actually planning to make chirashizushi with the sushi rice I prepared, but when I cut into my avocado I found it had… gone bad. Aw.
But there’s always a chance to turn defeat into something good – and nobody will argue when the alternative is inarizushi! Yum.
The other layer holds a sliced Demeter tomato, the last of the corncob flowers, a soy sauce fishy and tamagoyaki on lettuce. Tasty!

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Bento #245 – fish quiche

Salmon and spinach quiche with a grainy crust, couscous in tomato sauce with onions and raisins, rucola and cherry tomatoes. Olive oil and balsamico vinegar dressing in the bottle. BF gets exactly the same in the other layer. I’m a bit worried that one layer each will be enough food but I stuffed them with rich food in any case!

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Bento #243

Sorry about the horrible lighting in this one – I was zoned out on cough syrup in the evening and had to make this in a hurry in the morning, no time to fiddle around with the camera!
Plain onigiri, homegrown cherry tomatoes and a toffee in the big compartment, a mini quiche, broccoli and a carrot heart in the small one.
I was so glad for bento staples in this one – but now I have to restock on all of them! Especially the quiches.

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Bento #240

Only 10 bentos left until #250!
This one is heavy on the proteins – hopefully it will help me back up from the nasty cold I caught at Aikido last week! Having a cold in summer feels silly.
Poof pastrymini quiche, half a hardboiled egg, lentil hazelnut balls, cherry tomatoes, sliced celery bites and peanut butter and raisins for dipping them, and a mint cookie for dessert.

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Bento #237

While my new batch of Puff pastry zucchini quiches for bento is cooling in the kitchen, here’s a bento with the last of the old batch.
Also in the box: Onigiri, cucumber slices, half a kumquat, bell pepper hearts in hummus, homegrown sugar peas, parsley and an amarettini cookie.

BF had exactly the same, so no photo.

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Bento #235

I have a few more boxes that might be postworthy lined up, but I just can’t get myself to blog very much recently.

For a nice midsummer picknick – mushroom and zucchini quiche, homegrown cherry tomatoes and sugar peas, and bulgur.

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Bento #228

Big box: Slice of quiche, carrot sticks, sundried tomato, cress, cherry tomato and olive.
Small box: Couscous (there’s more underneath the stuff in the big box), carrot sticks, cucumber, fishy with balsam vinegar, chocolate Cthulhu.

BF’s box.
And because I can never resist posting a photo of a quiche…

The quiche is filled with caramelized onion and feta, with a yellow cheese crust on top. It’s kind of a mix between two quiche recipes that I found in my cookbook (heavily influenced by what I actually had at home) but it’s really nice and savoury. If you serve this to a meat-eater, I promise he/she won’t miss anything.

Next time I will make thicker onion rings so they won’t lose so much substance while cooking. They are roasted in a cast-iron pan while the pie shell bakes.
There are also black olives and sundried tomato stripes in the filling, but the tomato didn’t add anything (it doesn’t seem to come out against the onion and the feta) and I’ll leave it out next time.

Ingredients in a neat list:
1 pie shell of your trust
2 onions, cut into rings and cooked in a castiron pan with a little olive oil
1 cup feta cubes
2-3 eggs, 1-2Tsp. sourcream or Greek Yoghurt
1 handful grated yellow cheese
Olives, salt, pepper, French herbs to taste
Layer the onion rings in the pie shell, mix everything else and pour over, top with grated cheese, bake.

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