Tarte au Chevre (Goat's Cheese and Onion Quiche)

Shamelessly stolen from the February 2011 issue of the Observer Food Monthly, where they share some excellent French recipes. I cheated and used store-bought pastry, and it wasn't as good, but I didn't have time to make it myself. I also had the wrong size tin so had to scale the recipe up by about 40%, and it worked fine, with 5 minutes extra cooking time.

We served this with their baked fennel (shown in the background of the photo), but I didn't find it a sufficient improvement on braised fennel to actually warrant bothering in future, unless I already had the oven on and felt like using the spare energy to heat something up.

For the quiche, you'll need a round 22cm tart tin at least 3.5cm deep with a removable base and beans for baking blind. I was extremely sceptical of their instructions for greasing the tin, but they really worked! One layer of butter, then another of flour.

Ingredients

For the pastry

• 200g flour
• 100g butter
• 1 egg yolk
• a little milk

For the filling

• 400g onions (usually 2-3)
• 25g butter
• 2 tsp thme leaves
• 2 eggs
• 200g creme fraiche or sour cream
• 200g full cream milk
• 180g goat's cheese

Blitz the flour and butter together in a food processor, until it forms tiny breadcrumbs. Stir in the egg yolk and enough milk to make a pastry dough. Pat the pastry into a flat round and roll out large enough to line the tart tin. Lightly butter the tin and dust it with a small amount of flour, shaking off any excess. Lay the dough into the tin and push it right into the corners without stretching. Trim off the overhanging pastry and repair any holes. Chill for 20 minutes.

At 200C, pre-bake the pastry case, using greaseproof paper (or foil) and baking beans to hold down the base. After 20 minutes, remove the case from the oven, pour out the beans, remove the paper and bake again for another 5 minutes, until the base is dry to the touch. Remove from the oven and turn it down to 180C.

While the crust is pre-baking, you can finely slice and fry the onions in the butter and thyme for a good 20 minutes, over a low heat, until they are totally falling apart, golden and tender. Beat the eggs and creme fraiche together, then slowly add the milk. (It will look like way too much, but the volumes do work out!) When you have blind-baked the pastry shell, put the onions in a layer on the bottom, crumble over the goat's cheese, then pour over the rest of the filling mixture. Bake at 180C for 40 minutes. The centre should quiver when gently shaken. Let it rest for at least 10 minutes, so you can serve it warm.

Sticky Spare Ribs with Watermelon Salad

Saturday we went out for a huge birthday lunch for my cousin at a lovely winery. I had a massive slab of pork belly, which was totally yum, and then a giant Bombe Alaska, sprinkled with popping candy, which made for a very cool multi-sensory dessert! One of the sides during the meal really shined for me - a simple salad of cubed watermelon, torn basil, and feta cheese. I replicated it at home; it was hard to guess the dressing but in the end I went for the juice of half a lemon, between two people, and that was exactly right. Just a tiny touch of acidity to balance the sweetness of the watermelon.

At the local butcher's, I picked up a short rack of spare ribs, which we BBQd for five minutes a side, and basted frequently with sweet barbecue sauce, until totally caramelised and sticky. Plain white rice was all we needed to complete the meal, cooked as usual in a 2:1 water:rice ratio. I'm glad we went for a 40k cycle ride or it would all have been a bit too decadent!

Red Pepper and Goat's Cheese Pizza

A quick end-of-week pizza using up some roasted red peppers and lovely crumbly sharp goats cheese. A handful of rocket on top and we're good to go!

Mushroom and Spinach Pancakes with Goats Cheese

I was planning to make a mushroom and goats cheese pizza or calzone this week, but today I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was Pancake Day! It's not as celebrated here as in the UK - probably because cooking a stack of pancakes on a hot stove when it's 40C outside is not a smart move. It's unusually cool this summer - just 28C this evening - so it wasn't too hot to make pancakes instead.

I googled for a recipe to convert my pizza topping into crepe filling, and stumbled across a lovely blog, Closet Cooking, which appears to be run by a guy called Kevin, cooking in a kitchen the size of a closet. I remember those days well! I love using blog recipes because they're made by real people, with real ingredients, and usually around the time constraints of a real job and in a real kitchen. So you know that it's doable in a sensible amount of time, and you're not going to find that the whole thing depends on some obscure ingredient or kitchen implement. So I followed Kevin's excellent recipe for yummy vegetarian savoury filling for whole-wheat pancakes, and they were spot-on. I did change just a couple of things so I've reblogged the recipe with my changes. My only mistake was not tripling the batter so that I'd have to make sweet pancakes :)

Ingredients:
For the filling:

• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 500g mushrooms
• a few sprigs of thyme, stripped to their leaves
• 250g frozen chopped spinach
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 splash dry sherry, or splash white wine + 1tsp of sugar
• 1/2 cup balsamic vinegar 
• 6 wholewheat crepes
• 1 large handful goat cheese, crumbled

For the pancakes (makes 6):

• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup plain white flour
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup milk
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 1 tbsp vegetable oil

Set your spinach defrosting (in the microwave or on the hob).

Whisk all the batter ingredients together to create the pancake batter and start making crepes. You'll probably find that the chaff of the wholewheat flour sinks to the bottom, so try to ladle up the lower layer occasionally, and add a little water toward the end if you find that the batter becomes too thick.

Drain the spinach well, in a sieve. Crush it a bit with your hands to get all the water out.

Finely chop the onion and gently fry until soft and turning golden, about 8 minutes. Slice the mushrooms thinly. Crush the garlic and add it, the butter, the mushrooms and the thyme to the onions, then sweat for a further 6-10 minutes, until the mushrooms have let out their liquid. Add the spinach and season well with pepper, and a little salt; warm through. Reduce the balsamic vinegar in a small saucepan - it takes a couple of minutes.

Fold the crepes into little pockets and scoop in the filling, tucking in crumbled goats cheese as you go. Drizzle over the balsamic reduction and serve!

Leek and Goat's Cheese Quiche

Very much borrowing from Delia's recipe here, except that I majorly cheat by using ready-bought pastry, and I omit the spring onions as I think I'm weirdly sensitive to them, and prefer not to use them when the dish is full of subtle flavours. I cooked this as soon as I got home, and it took me about an hour, with another ten minutes waiting for the quiche to cool down - utterly vital so that the quiche cuts and serves cleanly, but usually I find I am hungriest when I have nothing to do but wait. Luckily writing this blog means I can burn a few minutes taking photos :)

My pastry is not as neat as Delia's.

You'll need a 7-8" quiche tin, preferably with a removable base, and it helps to have a baking sheet to place it on so that you can move it in and out of the oven easily. This serves four, and is great with salad, steamed veg, or baked tomatoes. Have a few boiled, buttered new potatoes as well, if you're very hungry.

Ingredients:

• 350g ready-made shortcrust pastry, chilled
• 2 leeks
• 200g soft sharp goats cheese
• 3 large eggs, beaten
• 200 ml crème fraîche

Preheat the oven to 180 C. Roll out the pastry on a lightly-floured surface until you can place your quiche tin inside, and have at least four inches of pastry all around the edge. Lift the pastry into the tin, and ease it down into the corners. Trim off some of the biggest excess, but leave a good two inches more than the edge of the tin, as it shrinks a lot in the oven. Brush the sides and base with a little beaten egg and fork the base, then bake in the oven for 20-25 minutes, until golden-brown all over.

Meanwhile, top, tail and slice the leeks lengthwise, and rinse under running water, fanning the leaves apart to remove any dirt. Finely slice and fry in a heavy frying pan in a little olive oil for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until very wilted and beginning to caramelise. Remove from the heat, and break up the goats cheese into large pieces. Briskly stir the eggs and cream together in a jug, until well-combined, and season well with black pepper.

Place the leeks and cheese into the pastry casing, and pour over the egg and cream mixture, scraping out any extra with a spatula. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes, until puffed and golden-brown. Let rest for 10 minutes before slicing - you can do it!

Macaroni & Cheese

Saturday night we ate out in the delightfully kitsch Trafford Centre, opting for pan-Asian cuisine at Tampopo. The food was very good for a reasonable price, and they had those lovely large spiced Indonesian prawn crackers and a good selection of Asian beers. Then we hit the mini-golf and Laser Quest; I narrowly won the former, and as a team we utterly destroyed the opponents in the latter. Although one team did consist of a slightly overweight dad and two small children, and were essentially cannon-fodder. Hellstorm, Punky Fish and Captain Atom ruled the day ;)

Sunday we visited the scenic caves of Stockport, then had a relaxing drive home, taking the scenic route over the Peak District via Chesterfield, later driving through the low-traffic neon streets, which to me is like driving in some sort of utopian future. Having eaten a big carvery lunch, we refueled on the go with oranges and cereal bars, getting back in to Cambridge for a bowl of filled pasta before bedtime. Driving's still pretty exhausting for me, and Monday I awoke very tired, so in the evening I craved easy comfort food and an early night. As we had almost nothing in the house it was difficult to figure out something to cook in my tired state, but after a few minutes I realised I had a perfect set of ingredients for the ultimate comfort food.

Ingredients:

• 300 g of dried pasta, preferably small and tubular
• 1 small white onion
• a couple of bay leaves
• 350 ml milk
• a wedge of butter
• 1 tbsp plain or cornflour
• 175 g soft white goat's or sheep's milk cheese
• a few slices of old bread or the end of a baguette
• parmesan

Preheat the oven to 200 C. Boil the pasta in plenty of water for its packet cooking time. Peel and halve the onion, and put it and the bay leaf and milk in a pyrex bowl or pan. Microwave or heat for 10 minutes, watching toward the end so that it does not boil over. When it comes close to the boil, remove from the heat. Microwave the butter in another pyrex jug or bowl until melted, then stir in the cornflour. Discard the onion from the milk, and a few tbsp at a time, stir the hot milk into the roux, until you have a white sauce. Microwave for a further minute, to bring back up to heat; it doesn't need to thicken in the jug.

Drain the pasta, break the cheese into small pieces, and combine them gently in a shallow casserole dish. ( I like to only just cover the bottom of a shallow dish, rather than stack up lots of pasta in a deep one; that way everyone gets more crispy topping!) Season with black pepper, then pour over the white sauce. Using an electric blender, whiz the bread until you have rough breadcrumbs; sprinkle these over the top, and then add a little finely grated parmesan. Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, until crisp and golden. Serve with a lemony spinach salad or sliced ripe tomatoes with a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Pumpkin and Goats Cheese Lasagne

One of my two favourite vegetarian lasagne recipes, this combines sweet roasted pumpkin with soft goats cheese and a garlicy tomato sauce into a taste explosion. I've adapted it from my memory of a Nigella Lawson recipe; hers is in her Christmas book and uses butternut squash. As usual, I used a Crown Prince - still £3 per 4 kg pumpkin in the market!

Ingredients:

• 1.2-1.4 kg good pumpkin, unpeeled weight
• 2 tsp dried or fresh thyme or rosemary
• 1 white onion
• 1 red onion
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1 glass of white wine
• 2 bay leaves
• 3 x 400g tins of tomatoes (chopped or plum)
• 2 tbsp tomato puree
• 250g of fresh lasagne sheets, or 180g dried
• 375g of soft, white rindless goat's cheese
• Parmesan cheese

Peel the pumpkin, discard any string and seeds, and chop into large (~1.5") pieces. Toss with the herbs, 1 tsp of salt and a little vegetable oil; roast at 200C for 35 minutes until tender and caramelised. Meanwhile, finely chop the onions and fry over a low heat for 10 minutes, until softened. Crush in the cloves of garlic and cook for a further minute. Deglaze the pan with the white wine and stir until the alcohol evaporates. Add the bay leaves, tomatoes and tomato purée; cover and bring to a simmer, then cook uncovered for 20 minutes until the tomatoes have broken up and the sauce has reduced by about 10%. Season to taste.

Pre-cook your lasagne sheets if they demand it. Slice the goat's cheese into rough ~cm-thick circles. In a deep lasagne dish, add:

1. a few tbsp of tomato sauce
2. lasagne
3. tomato sauce
4. half of the roast pumpkin
5. lasagne
6. tomato sauce
7. half of the goat's cheese circles
8. lasagne
9. tomato sauce
10. the rest of the pumpkin
11. a layer of lasagne
12. tomato sauce
13. the rest of the goat's cheese circles
14. a layer of lasagne
15. a few tbsp of tomato sauce
16. a generous grating of Parmesan cheese

(This is why I use a deep lasagne tray!) Cook in the oven at 170 C for 45 minutes, or until golden and bubbling. Rest for at least 10 minutes before cutting: if you can make this an hour ahead, it tastes better for it. It also keeps excellently in a cool place; somehow the flavours become even more sweet and delicious over time. We usually reheat it in pieces in the microwave, but if you plan to make it for guests on the following day, then you can cook it for 35 minutes the first time, chill until needed, then cook again in the oven for 35 minutes, rest for 10 minutes, then serve.

Tonight we served it with a shredded gem lettuce and a splash of balsamic vinegar, and garlic bread. I've never made garlic bread before, so I followed the excellent Joy of Cooking instructions. Take a baguette and slice it width-wise into circular coins - but don't cut all the way through the bread. Melt a few slices of butter in the microwave, and crush in a clove of garlic per person. Open each gap between the bread 'coins' and spoon in a little garlicy butter. Wrap in foil and bake at 200 C for twenty minutes, then bring to the table and unwrap in a cloud of garlicy steam. Yum!