Recipes & Cooking: September 2005 Archives
Whenever I have an ingredient left over from a recipe I feel a lot of pressure to use it up before it goes bad. Dairy is particularly stressful, so some buttermilk I had in the fridge was making me crazy. Since buttermilk is about the same thing as yogurt, I decided to make a lassi, and it was really great, cool and refreshing (yes, refreshing; must be the tartness that keeps it from being dairy overkill). I thought strawberry and buttermilk were a traditional combo, but then I've been wanting to make a cardamom lassi.
It was so easy to just throw into the blender a couple of green cardamom pods, a few frozen strawberries, sugar to taste and about 1 1/2 cups buttermilk. I let it sit in the fridge for a while to marry the flavors and get it nice and cool.
My friend Lisa gets a garden plot during the summer where she works, and this year she had a bumper crop of colorful tomatoes, which I plundered to make this tart. (I shared with her, so I don't think she minds.) It was so easy to do, too, that I'm tempted to go out and get more 'maters to make another one for a mom-friend on Tuesday.
I just rolled out a sheet of puff pastry dough a bit (to 1/8-of-an-inch-ish) and poked it all over with a fork to keep it from puffing up, leaving 1-inch edges unmarked. Then I baked it at 425 degrees for 5 minutes to get it kind of brown. The fork trick hadn't worked, so I just poked the center of the tart back down before spreading on some mustard and about 1/4 pound of grated gruyere. Overlapped sliced tomatoes on top, then sprinkled with salt, pepper and some chopped herbs from Lisa's garden (rosemary and oregano). Baked that for another 12 minutes, then allowed it to cool and cut into squares. (I had chopped up some basil and put it in some olive oil to drizzle over the top, then forgot to do it.) We ate it in the park with a lot of other picnic food (chicken fingers, corn and bean salsa with homemade chips, a tomato and mozzarella salad with pesto, mint tea and blueberry-nectarine cobbler with homemade ice cream for dessert).
