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.
