Crab and Asparagus Tart

The tarts were following me. In cookbooks, on blogs, in restaurants, I kept coming tart after tarts, some sweet, some savory, all looking insanely good to eat. I've had difficulty with pie crust in the past, however, (edible but not pretty) and tart crusts seemed too similar. Also it was baking, and I'm not a huge fan of baking. Finally though, the New York Times broke me down. I was minding my own business, sitting on the subway, happily reading an article about 2008 Kabinett Rieslings and how good they were in spring. Then I came across their suggestion for pairing. It was a recipe for a Crab and Asparagus Tart. I ran out and bought a tart pan.

I had to! This tart had in it just about everything I had been craving of late. Spring means asparagus, even if I had to shamefully buy it from California, it included goat cheese, which I already had in my fridge. And it had crab.

My family, for generations now, has been insane about blue crabs. Entire summer picnics have been designed around only the idea of a cooler full of crabs and a case of beer. On summer vacations we pulled them out of the bay, the scrawny little New Jersey crabs. A bar right on the water in Maryland has seen our faces several times, and when that bar was the subject of a feature article in the Times last fall, extolling the virtues of sitting on the deck picking apart crabs, I leaped off the subway at the next stop to call my mom, standing on a street corner in Manhattan as I tried to guide her to the right part of the website. "No Mom, you have to click on Travel. No not Styles, Travel. How did you end up in International? Look at the bar and click Travel!" No wonder visitors to the city think we're all crazy. In any case, it had been far too long since I'd eaten crab meat. I've been prowling the fish shops, waiting for soft shells to appear, but that's another month off. I didn't care if I wasn't going to be able to pick the meat myself, I wanted to eat it. I wanted to eat it with spring veggies and cheese. I had to make this tart.

It actually went pretty well! the nice thing about tart crusts is you don't have to pinch the crust all pretty like you do a pie. Once you have it laid in there, you can just roll your rolling pin over the top, and Ta Da! Perfectly trimmed pretty crust. I made only one significant change from the Times recipe. They call for 1 tablespoon chervil, essentially a fancy parsley. On the day I was doing my shopping I couldn't find it. I considered throwing in some regular parsley I had in my fridge, but I really wasn't feeling the bitter herbs with my nice, fresh, spring tart. I considered my ingredients, and decided fresh dill was what I really wanted to add to the flavor. Dill is so perfect for seafood, as well as for mixing with goat cheese, mild and soft in flavor but bringing a fresh dimension to an otherwise somewhat heavy dish.

Crab and Asparagus Tart

Adapted from the New York Times

Ingredients:

-1 and 1/4 cup flour (156.25 grams, I have learned from my new digital scale)

-1/2 teaspoon cayenne

-7 tablespoons unsalted butter

-4 large eggs

-1 Tablespoon minced shallot

-1/2 bunch medium asparagus, ends snapped, halved vertically and cut into 1 inch pieces

-8 oz lump crab meat

-1 Tablespoon lemon juice

-1 Tablespoon chopped dill

-3/4 cup half-and-half

-4 oz soft goat cheese

Directions:

Heat oven to 400 degrees. In a food processor, blend four, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and cayenne. Add 6 tablespoons cold butter and pulse until size of peas. In a separate bowl, beat 1 egg with 2 tablespoons of ice water. Scatter on flour mixture and pulse until a dough can be gathered together. Add a little more ice water if needed. Form into a disk and roll on a lightly floured surface until about 1/4 inch thick. Loosely roll your dough onto your rolling pin, then unroll it gently into a 9 inch tart pan.

Form dough to side of pan, then roll your rolling pin over to trim the edges. Line with foil and weight with pastry weights (or if you are like me and don't own those, pennies). Bake 10 minutes. Remove foil and weights and bake until it begins to look lightly browned, 5-10 minutes. Remove from oven. Reduce heat to 350 degrees.

Melt remaining tablespoon of butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add shallot and cook 1 minute. Add asparagus and cook about 2 minutes, until they start to soften. Remove from heat. Fold in crab meat, lemon juice, and dill. Season with salt to taste. Spread mixture into pastry shell.

Whisk half-and-half and goat cheese until smooth. Beat in the remaining 3 eggs until well blended. Pour over crab mixture. (You may have a little too much, I did. I just poured until it looked like it was going to breach the pastry wall, then stopped.) Place in oven and bake about 40 minutes, until set and lightly browned. Let cool 15 minutes, remove the sides of the pan and serve at once or cooled to room temperature.

I was pleased with how this turned out. It was excellent the day of and I think even better for lunch the next day, so it could definitely be made the night before if you planned on serving it for brunch.

The cayenne added a little heat, more of a mouth feel then a spicy flavor. It was the perfect thing because we paired it with the crisp white wine that had been recommend, but if you were doing this for a brunch, I might leave it out. Next time I might trim back the asparagus and the crab a little bit and throw in some sliced mushrooms with the shallots. The article even recommends replacing the asparagus with diced zucchini later in the summer. The recipe is open to a lot of adaptable options, so you can make it your own. Now that I own my own tart pan, the possibilities are endless.

2009 Wrap-Up

This week's blog is designed as a little grab-bag of minutia: A few thoughts that may not have enough content for a full post, but are still worth sharing.

When Heather and I exchanged Christmas presents this year, we discovered that each of our main event presents were suited to the over 21 crowd. I had purchased Heather a one-year membership to the New York Times wine club. Heather and I both love wine and because the wine club is run by the New York Times, we can be sure that each bottle will be erudite and elitist--just our style. Every two months she will be mailed a new bottle with food pairing suggestions and a corresponding review from the Times' dining section.

Heather got me a beer brewing kit! I'm sure I'll be blogging about that in more detail later, but suffice it to say, I'm very excited about it. She even got me ingredients to make an IPA and a book that helps me make sense of this whole process. Heather may regret her decision soon when she walks into a apartment filled with boiling wort and asks, "What smells in here?" and I respond, "That's the sweet scent of malted barley and hops. Get used to it." Hopefully I do it right and the fermenter bucket doesn't explode in our study and cover all our books in yeast. This marriage probably won't last long.

Speaking of my marriage partner, Heather poked me emphatically when she saw an article a couple of days ago in the New York Times singing the praises of Benedictine. I love to discover things before they become a craze so when I read the article, I smugly assumed that it was because they read my blog post about it. Let me tell you folks, self delusion is a real ego boost.

We used the holiday season as a weak excuse to replenish our somewhat depleted alcohol supply--Bourbon, Rye, Cognac, Vodka, Frangelico--as well as a few new things like Lillet and Peychaud's Bitters. This month our credit card bill included four bars, three liquor stores, two wine shops and a partridge in a pear tree. Admittedly the partridge was a frivolous purchase, but he has been great company so far. With all of the time consuming hectic-ness (if it's not a word, it should be) of the wedding and Christmas, we are determined to use our January to live as hermits. We will leave the apartment only to keep our jobs and forage for food. The liquor purchases serve that goal.

Hopefully our anti-social behavior for the month of January will give us some time to try new things in mixing and cooking, fail at those things and blog about them in a humorous manner. And in the end, isn't that what blogging is all about?

The NY Times Dining Section or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love those Sugar Coated Ticking Timebombs

As many of you may know, Heather is an avid reader of the New York Times dining section. This past Wednesday's dining section was filled with all sorts of fun, summery, sugary, hangover inducing, spirited concoctions. When Heather got home from work, she promptly kicked open the door, shoved the dining section in my face and screamed, “MAKE IT!” After I fixed the lock on the door (safety first people,) I made it. The “it” was a Whiskey Peach Smash. I muddled mint, lemon and peach into an ounce of water and a half an ounce of simple syrup (three parts sugar dissolved into two parts boiling water. Let cool and keep refrigerated. I make it myself and keep it around, it comes in handy,) shake in a shaker with ice and 2 oz. of bourbon and strain over ice. There was a lot of crap left in the shaker that clogged the strainer, but with a little persistence, anything is possible. A mojito glass gives it a nice summery feel and makes one feel more festive and less like a problem drinker.

My first round was a standard mint julep. I’ve loved mint juleps ever since I’ve started making them earlier this year. The dining section suggested we use gin. Where do they get off? I don’t care for gin. Neither does Heather. She one commented that it tastes the way you would expect perfume to taste. No argument here. Tequila is about as flowery a spirit as I can deal with. Mint juleps are made with bourbon, sugar, mint and crushed ice. Don’t mess with what works. Screw innovation. For those of you who don’t know, I also listen to the latest Al Jolson hits via gramophone and ride around in a horse-drawn carriage.

Heather’s second round was a Queens Park Swizzle, one of the signature drinks at Dutch Kills—a bar in Long Island City. The man pictured in the article has a wicked handlebar mustache that makes me feel jealous and insecure. If he challenged me to fisticuffs, I would have to back down. If you had to place a be on who would win in a fistfight—a guy with a handlebar mustache or a guy who is not mustachioed at all—there would be no contest. I can’t compete with that.

It might be a little silly to plug a bar that we’ve never been to, but we’ve been meaning to go. It’s just that we’ve been busy lately. Get off my back! I’m sorry I snapped like that. Forget it ever happened—The drink is kind of like a mojito but instead of club soda, it uses angostura bitters; instead of cubed ice, it uses crushed ice; and instead of tossing the mixture, it requires you to stir gently with a swizzle stick to maintain a layered effect. It also calls for a whole lime’s worth of juice rather than a half lime. If you like your drinks nice and limey then use the whole lime, but I think half of a lime would be plenty.

My final drink was by far the simplest—what can I say? As the evening goes on, I get lazier. It was a John Collins. It’s prepared the same as a Tom Collins, but it calls for Vodka instead of Gin*. All it needs is juice from a whole lemon, about 3/4 oz. simple syrup, two shots of vodka and top with club soda for pleasant effervescence. It’s sort of like a Mike’s Hard Lemonade but cheaper and with the added satisfaction of making it yourself.

Contrary to the title of this post and the first few sentences, we did not have hangovers the next morning. The after effects of sugary drinks can be quelled with moderation.

*I’m glad that this drink has a name that’s similar and yet separate from the original. On a few occasions I’ve heard people sharply criticize the Vodka Martini as not being a martini. My response is always that I don’t care if it’s not a martini, that’s the drink I want. If it were called something else, I would order that. This may be a topic for another blog post.

Portabella Burgers

Last year Michael Pollan wrote an article in the NY Times proposing a theory on the human diet that went as follows: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Looking at my own cooking I realized that I didn't follow this theory by a long shot, I was a die hard carnivore. Blogger and Times food columnist Mark Bittman has been using a "vegan before six" approach to achieving this, and I modified that approach to "vegetarian before six" because you'll get my cheese and bread when you pry them out of my cold dead hands. Full disclosure: I've been known to cheat with sushi, ahi tuna is a seductive siren to me.

The economy being what it is, this has meant increasing my vegetarian cooking skills in the evening so that leftovers can be brought into work for lunches. It's a recession diet baby. Up until about 6 months ago almost all of my best cooking was done with meat so learning to cook without it, even on the occasional basis, has been a severe challenge. Seeing a sale on portabella mushrooms last week, I decided to test that staple of the vegetarian diet, the Portabella Burger.

The recipe I used included brushing with a balsamic vinaigrette, grilling, topping with cheese, tomato, and arugula and sticking on a grilled bun. With a brilliant stroke of luck, I had made lamb chops with a rosemary balsamic sauce the week before, and the remaining sauce was still in the fridge. Any opportunity to not waste expensive balsamic sauce I seize upon. The sauce mixed with some olive oil worked beautifully in place to the vinaigrette. Should you not happen to have such a delightful sauce in your fridge, however, store bought should work just fine.

Rosemary Portabella Burgers

Addapted from Bon Appetit

Ingredients:

2/3 cup balsamic vinaigrette
2 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
4 round rolls, split
4 large portobello mushrooms; (about 5 inches in diameter), stemmed
4 slices deli-style provolone cheese
1 tomato, thinly sliced
1 cup (loosely packed) arugula leaves

Directions:

Prepare grill (medium-high heat). Whisk vinaigrette and rosemary in small bowl. Brush cut sides of rolls with vinaigrette. Place rolls on grill, cut side down. Grill until lightly toasted, about 1 minute. Transfer to plates.

Brush mushrooms on both sides with vinaigrette. Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Place mushrooms on grill, dark gill side down. Close grill or cover mushrooms with small metal roasting pan; cook until mushrooms begin to soften, brushing with vinaigrette once, about 5 minutes. Turn mushrooms over. Cover; grill until tender when pierced with knife, about 7 minutes longer. Place 2 cheese slices on each mushroom. Cover; grill until cheese melts, about 1 minute.

Place 1 mushroom on bottom half of each roll. Top each with tomato, arugula, and top half of roll.

The best part? By wrapping the tomato and mushroom separately and sticking an extra piece of provolone, a handful of arugula, and a bun in a bag, I had two days of brilliant vegetarian lunches that were envied by coworkers, making me feel the appropriate level of smug. When arugula is sticking out of your sandwich, people know you aren't eating PB&J.

You will notice on this blog that a good deal of the recipes come from Epicurious. I am a Gourmet Magazine subscriber and they post many current and past recipes here along with ones from Bon Appetit. Like an 80 year old woman, I still subscribe to print publications. I get daily delivery of the NY Times and currently refuse to buy a Kindle. Someday I will probably be won over when they start refusing to bring me my lovely paper every day, but for now I revel in my stubbornness.

Last thing before I sign off for the week, I mentioned in my welcome message that I work out of a very tiny urban kitchen, and I thought the readers might like to know how tiny.

And no, there is no dishwasher.