Spring 2011, Welcome Back

Spring of 2011 finds me back in Ohio with a new job, a sort-of new place and some new commitments. I received a tapered rolling pin and some tiny fluted tart pans for Christmas, and I broke out the puff pastry this morning. Also, I joined the local CSA Grow Youngstown, so I believe a crash course in preparing vegetables should begin sometime in June. Should I ever come to find a use for beets or okra I'll consider this move a huge success.


To begin, I tried an asparagus tart for Mother's Day. I found one of Martha's recipes on Tastespotting, which means it was well-tested. I thought the puff pasty would be tough to work with, but it turned out to be much easier to handle than I thought. I'll need some more experience rolling the dough out to the desired size, in part because my Silpat mat was smaller than both the dimensions in the recipe and my rectangular tart pan. I just went with a free-form tart that fit the size of the asparagus, scoring, pricking and pre-baking the pastry according to the package directions.

The recipe called for 1 1/2 lbs. of medium to thick asparagus, and the market was selling tiny, slim stalks. This ended up being just as well, because had I baked the tart as long as the resipe had called for it would have been very overcooked. Also, Martha asked for 2c (5 1/2 oz.) of Gruyere cheese, but I used the remainder of some dill Harvarti that I needed to use up. It worked, although with the addition of the tablespoon of olive oil drizzled over the asparagus this tart had a lot of excess fat.


The only additional seasoning involved was salt and pepper. My regular pepper mix is half and half black and red peppercorns, so I used a rough grind of that, plus NuSalt. I reserved a little of the cheese for sprinkling over the asparagus and baked, keeping an eye on the color of the pastry. Instead of using parchment paper, which I've been very lazy about purchasing, I went with a Silpat mat. I pulled the tart about 4 minutes early, both because of the darkening pastry and because of the small stalks.

It came out great! I'll have to try this with mushrooms and with fruit. It will take a while to get the pastry/filling baking time down, and I need to be more aggressive pricking the crust prior to the pre-baking, but overall I was very impressed.