Savoury Summer Picnic Pie

With our CSA veggies from Amelis’Hof comes a leaflet, de Amelisbode, usually containing a recipe for some of the week’s vegetables. This week it’s a savoury ‘Picnic Pie’ with oven-roasted garlic, tomatoes and rosemary. I only had to substitute the anchovies to make it vegan/vegetarian! The rosemary came from the herb garden on our balcony.

This recipe is definitely a keeper so I’d like to share it with you for Beth Fish’s Weekend Cooking and the Whip Up Something New! challenge (which I’m hosting this month btw). It’s the ultimate summer pie! And since I made a few more adaptations I feel it’s okay to rename it. :)

Amelis’Hof Summer (Picnic) Pie with Garlic and Tomatoes

Ingredients
Serves 2.

• olive oil
• 3 sun-dried tomatoes
• 1 head of garlic
• 350 gr tomatoes
• 1 small or 1/2 big red onion
• 3 sheets of vegan puff pastry
• 12 black olives
• 1 tbs caper berries
• 1 tbs of chopped rosemary
• (optional) some chopped oregano or other fresh herb of you choice
• freshly ground salt & pepper

Preparation

1. Preheat oven at 200 degrees Celsius.
2. Soak sun-dried tomatoes in hot water.
3. Separate garlic cloves — leave the skin on! — and put them in some olive oil in a high oven-proof dish.
   
4. Cut tomatoes in thick slices, put them in an oven dish.
5. Slice red onion and add to tomatoes.
6. Pour a tablespoon of olive oil over the tomato-onion mix, and add some freshly ground salt & pepper.
   
7. Roll out pastry dough and fill baking dish, punching a few holes in the bottom with a fork. Layer with beans or ceramic beads for pre-baking.
   Whatever you’re using for blind baking; it’s always smart to put some parchment paper in first to prevent your beans/beads from sticking to the dough… I often forget. ;)
   
8. Put all three dishes in the oven and bake puff pastry for 10 minutes, tomatoes and garlic  15 minutes.
9. In the meantime mince olives, caper berries (you may want to rinse these first if they’re really salty) and soaked sun-dried tomatoes.
10. After 10 minutes take your pie dough out of the oven, remove blind filling and bake for another 5 minutes.
11. Now your tomatoes, garlic and puff pastry should be ready at about the same time. Allow the roasted garlic to cool for a few minutes.
12. Peel the garlic cloves, mince, and mix HALF of it with the olives, sun-dried tomatoes and capers.
    
13. Spread the mixture on the bottom of your pie, layer with tomatoes and onion, add rosemary (& other fresh herbs of your choice) and the rest of the crushed garlic. Sprinkle with a little more salt & pepper.
    
14. Put your picnic pie into the oven for another 5-10 minutes.

BON APPETIT!

We had this quiche accompanied by a green salad with asparagus, more fresh herbs from our ‘garden’ (thyme & oregano), chopped walnuts & pistachios and a balsamic vinegar dressing with extra virgin olive oil, agave syrup, salt and pepper. I’m afraid the picture has a weird colour: we had the shades down because it was so sunny!

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Post submitted to…

& Part of Zesty Palette’s ongoing Bake Fest #4 hosted by Tomato Blues

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Just in time (Amelishof CSA vegetables week 30, 2010)

Okay, I know this post is a bit late, but these were the local organic veggies we ate in the past days. There’ll be a new batch tomorrow!

• Cauliflowers (Indian curry with tofu on Monday)
• Red berries (snack)
• Swiss chard (quiche and salad on Friday)
• Zucchinis  (zucchini soup with fresh mint on Thursday, together with salad and garlic ciabatta)
• Leek (Monday’s curry and … to be decided)
• Parsley (multiple use)

I’m sorry that this week’s recipes are both in Dutch!

This courgette soup can be eaten hot, lukewarm or cold. I did it all ;)

This savory swiss chard pie can also be made with (wild) spinach.

Carb-o-bento (#67)

Bento #67 is quite full of carbohydrates. That’s good: half of a bento should consist of these, but I usually take less because I also bring one or two sandwiches to work. Not today though :)

What foodies are you looking at? Beet & potato salad, fennel & tomato salad, leek pie, roasted sunflower seeds to go with the baked zucchini and last but not least: Neapolitan white beans — I think they tasted even better cold than they did hot! :) What am I saying? It was all really very good :)) And I made each of these dishes myself from scratch. (*Gnoe pats her own back* ;)
For dessert I had some mango.

BTW do you like the look of my new divider grass ?! I do I do I do! :)

Bento #66 en route

I should have taken my 66th bento on my 13,5 km NS-hike with the Wandelgrrls: Bieslandse Bos, from Delft to Zoetermeer. Why? Because it makes me think of the famous song Route 66! And… MaaikeB brought her first bento ever for lunch! She’s got the most beautiful bento box, a gift all the way from Tokyo. Lucky grrl! :)

Anyway, we took off early (for a Sunday morning) so I didn’t have much time to plan a real lunchbox. That’s why bento #66 only traveled by train from Utrecht to Apeldoorn on Monday ;) And it contained the following…

Upper tier

• Salad of grilled zucchini and bell pepper, lettuce, tomato, spring onion, capers and basil leaves

Lower tier

• Dried cranberries and strawberries
• 1/4 mini quiche made of leftovers: chard, goats cheese (feta) with basil, pine nuts and egg
• Carrots
• Walnut
• Basil and parsley

Bento #60

I present to you: Thursday 9th of July’s bento (#60).

Upper tier:

• quiche wedge (rocket salad*, potato*, pine nuts, cheese, egg*)
• basil*
• seedless grapes
• red & black currants*
• homegrown bean sprouts*
• radish
• emmental La vache qui rit cheese
• homegrown garden cress*

Lower tier

• beet* salad on romaine leaves* (go to bento #59 for ingredients)
• gherkin
• radish
• dill*

All ingredients marked with ‘*’ were organic. We got some new garden beet in our veggie bag this week. What shall we prepare with them this time? Their leaves, which are almost the same as (Swiss) chard and can be processed like spinach, we already ate in a Italian pasta sauce.

Veggiebag week 28-2009
I decided I would like to be able to look up what came in our weekly Aardvlo bag of organic vegetables. At the end of each year there’s a questionnaire about what you would love to get more often — or what you didn’t like so much. A question that’s easier to answer when you can remember what you got! :-o

So, week 28 of 2009 brought us: a whole bag of basil (we made some fresh pesto sauce and used that on bruschettas, in a salad dressing and for a pasta salad), a head of lettuce, leeks (we had some oven steamed with cheese; there’s one stalk left which we will probable eat with nasi goreng), tomatoes, red beet with leaves, red and black berries.

Are you all really jealous now? ;)

Good beginnings bento (#51)

Bento #51 was not only a good beginning of the next fifty (on the way to 100!), but also a great start of the week :)

I’ve been getting questions about preparation time. Well, this bento to me a relaxed 12 minutes in the morning! Could have been quicker if I had been in a hurry! :) Of course I’m only counting throwing in the quiche, not baking it LOL. I also had the steamed green beans ready to go and I cleaned my yellow tomatoes, radishes and a carrot the night before. Nothing I couldn’t have done in a sec this morning :)

Gnoe’s tip: did you know that steaming vegetables is so much quicker and healthier when you do it in the microwave? Do follow instructions though (LOL). It sounds obvious but I know a lot of people who don’t use the microwave for cooking veggies.

Well, I’ve already mentioned some of my bento’s content but here’s the complete list:

• yellow grape tomatoes
• strawberries
• red salad leaves
• spinach pie with blue cheese, leeks, pinenuts and black sesame seeds
• some cranberries
• walnut and hazelnuts
• carrot hiding under green beans
• garden cress
• radishes
• basil
• and… mini rhubarb-raspberry crumble!

As you can see I tried to do something creative with the radishes :-o I had hoped the carefully peeled skin would ‘flower’ after I had put the veggies in some ice water but… it failed ;) And yes, that experiment took place within the before mentioned 12 minutes! ;)

Count down… (bento #49)

This is the bento I took to the office on Monday May 10th. It was put together quite quickly!

It contains broccoli quiche (bought), radishes, basil, a small piece of emmental cheese, homegrown mustard cress and dito bean sprouts (taugeh), cucumber and a dressing of soy sauce, lemon juice and sesame oil. Homegrown bean sprouts taste soooo much better!

Yay, my next bento will be number 50! :-o