Roasted Winter Vegetable Tart

More and more I come to respect the course of the seasons, the long absence of summer fruit and vegetables. I had the desire to eat seasonally for a long time, but I still bought tomatoes in winter, unripe peaches or watery strawberries. I never bought said strawberries in fall or winter, but still, strawberries picked unripe and shipped and packaged never taste good. I always knew, but I still wanted that taste, bought the strawberries and was so disappointed. No more. Now I get most of my veggies in a weekly csa box, no eggplant or tomatoes from them right now. That's completely fine with me, their carrots and beets are beautiful. I get a lot of salad, and I'm really inspired to find more ways to eat them, and not let them eat me or me fridge (If you would like to hear about what to do with all the salad, let me know. I'd love to share what I did until now)

It feels like spring here, at the moment. I have no doubts that winter will soon return for a few more weeks, but right now the air smells of spring. The earth seems to awake, everything is just that bit greener. I really would love to eat asparagus right now. Or fresh peas, with just a little bit salt and butter.

I know that it is too early. My excitement will only grow more, and on the first day that I see asparagus here I'll be really happy. For now, I'm sticking, faithfully, to my root vegetables. They are not the only vegetables I eat right now (think cauliflower, cabbage, kale), but I just have a special place in my heart for them.
When I saw the January cover from bon appetit, I thought the tart it showed would feature many different winter vegetables. I was a bit disappointed, in the recipe and Ottolenghi, who I thougt was more of a seasonal cook. Peppers, tomatoes and eggplant right now?

Picture from last night. This is how the tart looked whole.

Hell no, and I dare to say that I think my version is better. I really loved the lemon zest, it added a much needed kick of freshness to the roasted vegetables.

And the homemade crust with buckwheat is just wonderful. I think I'll never go back to buying ready-to-use crust again, it just doesn't taste good and it contains strange things that I think have no business in a pie crust. You could use just your regular recipe for a pie crust, but adding buckwheat flour was a great idea. It makes play the crust a bigger role, not just the backdrop for what you put in there.

Before I forget to say it. It takes some time to prepare this tart. However, most of the time is spent chilling the dough, letting the vegetables roast, cool down etc. I'm currently writing some papers for college, and I just took some breaks from writing to prepare the different parts, but I really got something done too.

Spicy Squash Salad with Wild Rice and Parsley

I barely have time to cook. Or rather I barely had time to cook. Having three presentations at college in a row (one per week) is just not such a great idea. Taking up another little job, writing for a homepage, at the same time might not be the clever idea I thought it was.
Many things got neglected in the meantime, I had almost no time to enjoy fall until now and I had to work all weekend long. Tomorrow, after my presentation about the 'Greening of Protestant Thought', this should be over. There will still be things to read, translations to make and classes to visit, but I'll have my weekends back.

One thing I did try to keep up doing is preparing lunch to take to college or to work. I made "salads", mostly. My definition of salad is somewhat loose, though. I usually don't add a real dressing, so a salad is more a cold meal that was planned to be eaten cold (in contrast to left-overs).
For today I prepared this squash salad. I saw the recipe on The Moveable Feasts, it is from Bon Appetit originally.
I did not have smoked paprika on hand and could not find it in the supermarket I went to, so I had to do without. I also decided early on that I wanted to add lots of parsley. (This is probably because I saw a recipe in one of Jamie Oliver's books, that used tarragon as main salad ingredient. Really interesting idea!)
And I swapped out the lentils for a wild rice mix (this is just regular rice and wild rice mixed, I think it was something like a 8:2 ratio)
It is a lovely little fall salad, way better than anything I could get to eat here for lunch...

Do you prepare lunch to take to work or to college? And what do you prepare if you do?

Tapas

I am a recovering perfectionist. I expect things to be just as I imagined and planned them. This obviously results in lots of disappointment and stress. Then I offered to plan and prepare an "apero riche" for my mother's birthday. I think I talked of nothing else for about a week before her birthday. I had lots of ideas I knew my mother would not be too fond of - my family is not as experimental as I am when it comes to eating. They like the familiarity of the things they always prepare for birthdays and other celebrations.
I came up with a few ideas that were not too new, not too strange, but not boring and old either.
Everything turned out great, the food was a success and we made enough for everyone. (and way too much of the lentil and couscous salad...)

I'm going to share with you the recipe for Goats Cheese and Onion Confit Crostini. They sort of had a slow start, people were not too sure about the cheese, about the amount of onions and so only a few were eaten at first. But after that, when every one who tried one wanted more, we had to go back to the kitchen to make more.
The combination of the tangy flavor of the goats cheese and the sweetness of the onions is delicious, and makes people come back for more.

Potato Pizza

Before I went on holidays I spent a short weekend at Lake Brienz in Switzerland. I love to be there, it is really quiet and the environment is beautiful. Sometimes we spend a long time in the kitchen there, and sometimes, like this weekend, we made something quicker, so that we could spend more time outside, lying in the sun and reading.
This weekend we made a potato pizza. There is a recipe for a potato pizza in my cookbook by Nigel Slater, but since I did not have it with me, we just improvised.
It feels really decadent to put potatoes on a pizza dough, with not a whole lot more.
The pizza turned out just as I hoped it would. The crust was really thin and crispy, and the potatoes were a bit sweet. The goats cheese added some creaminess to the otherwise crispy pizza.

Galettes Bretonnes and Cookbook Challenge Update

I have been cooking from my cookbook but did not have time to take pictures, or the food was not really picture worthy.
Soon we'll travel to France again, like last summer, and we'll cycle through the Bretagne. We've been there last year too, and a culinary specialty of this region is the Galette Bretonne. It is similar to a Crêpes but made from buckwheat flour. They are great with savoury fillings. We made a Spinach filling and a Goats cheese and onion filling. I want to share the Goats cheese filling because it is more typical of the region, and also because my boyfriend made the other one and I'm not sure how he made it.