Sometimes a new recipe just pops into my head. This happened the other day with this zucchini-red onion tart. Often it’s a visual thing. I open the fridge, spot an ingredient or two and think, Oh! That could be good. As you may know, it’s been incredibly hot in Paris this summer — too hot to spend much time in the kitchen. So I had a store-bought pie shell in the fridge, plus eggs, cream, milk and cheese, and fresh thyme growing outside my veranda.
Tarte courgette-oignon rouge / Zucchini-red onion tart
Of course this tart is even better if you make your own pie crust, preferably a pâte brisée (savory crust). But there will be plenty of time for that as the days grow cooler. Meantime we’re at the height of zucchini season, and it’s fun thinking up how to use the venerable vegetable. There are already so many zucchini recipes on this site that I was surprised to come up with a new one. If you don’t feel like making a tart, you could try spicy zucchini soup, cold zucchini-lentil soup, zucchini purée with basil, zucchini sautéed with garlic, zucchini fritters, fusilli with zucchini or last summer’s discovery, zucchini pancakes.
Making the tart is pretty simple. Once your pie shell is chilling, you sauté zucchini rounds briefly, then sauté red onion slices until they’re golden. You mix together eggs, cream, milk, salt and pepper, you grate some cheese, you pile this all into your pie shell and bake for 25-30 minutes. Total preparation time clocks in at about an hour, including baking.
Regular readers may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been cooking. I had a lot of fun during the soccer World Cup playing a game called ‘match the match’. This involved inviting friends over to watch a match and serving the cuisine of one of the two teams. When Senegal played France, I made one of my favorite African recipes, poulet mafé (chicken with peanut sauce). When tiny Curaçao played Germany, I made Caribbean jerk chicken, another favorite. (When I announced the menu ahead of time to the friend who was coming, he said, ‘Great. I feared the wurst’.) Ha ha.
Now that we’re heading towards fall I’ll be around more, with some great dishes in the line-up. One is a French classic, steak tartare, which I had hoped to make for this post but couldn’t as all the butchers in my neighborhood are closed for the month of August. Another is baklava, which is far easier to prepare than you may imagine and far tastier made at home than purchased at a Greek deli. Meantime the little yellow plums called mirabelles are just coming into season, and if I can find some airtight jars I may just make a batch of mirabelles à l’eau de vie, in which the fruit macerates in clear fruit brandy with a little sugar. These jars make great Christmas presents. Just thinking ahead…
Happy cooking.
I’m a little concerned about the details of the recipe because under ingredients it says 1 teaspoon butter, but 15 g is a tablespoon of butter. So that makes me doubt whether 3 teaspoons of evoo is really 3 teaspoons. Anybody who’s actually cooking this is gonna run into the problem. No comments?
Hi Richard. Thanks for pointing this out. You’re right — 15 grams of butter equals a tablespoon. I have now corrected the recipe to read 5 grams. So, to recap, you cook the zucchini in 2 tsp. olive oil, and the red onions in 1 tsp. of olive oil and 1 tsp. of butter. In fact I could have simplified this to say 1 tsp. of olive oil and a small piece of butter — because in fact, in this recipe as in so many others, the quantities are approximate and variable. For example, if you have more zucchini than red onions, no problem, and the reverse is also true. If you don’t have any butter, you can cook the red onions in 2 tsp. of olive oil instead. Et cetera. I should spell this out more often in recipes where the quantities do not have to be exact. The exception is pastry, where a cake may not work if you alter the quantities of flour, eggs, butter, etc. But for soups, stews, tarts, salads and many other dishes, you can play around a bit. It’s not rocket science.
Hi Meg, thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. Actually I used a tablespoon of butter and it came out great. My wife loved it!I’m kind of slow and it’s the first time I made this recipe so it took me quite a little while to do the mise en place and get the filling ready. Anyway it took 40 minutes at 350 til it looked done. I checked my oven temperature which was correct and even a little bit higher than 350. I’m wondering about blind baking the crust (which I made myself, and that was really good.) for maybe 10 minutes? I made it in a Pyrex 9 inch dish, which was really cold when it came out of the refrigerator.
Hi Richard. Very happy to hear you enjoyed the tart, and bravo for making the crust yourself! Possibly yours took longer to cook than mine because you used a deeper dish. As for blind baking the crust, I find it’s generally not necessary for this sort of tart and there’s also a risk that the edges could get too brown. But if you want to try it, be sure to fill the crust with dried beans or some such to make sure it stays flat. Happy cooking…
So glad to hear that you are still at it; I thought I had inadvertently been dropped from your site. I always enjoy reading your posts and have never been disappointed in any of your recipes that I have tried. This one sounds easy and delicious; I’m anxious to try it.
Hi Janet and thanks so much for this note! No, I was not dropped from my site but rather ran into some issues that kept me away from my computer for a while. But now I’m back and hope to keep bringing you great recipes every couple of weeks, as usual. Also, it is cooling down in Paris now after a brutal summer, and this is inspiring me to spend more time in the kitchen! Cheers, Meg