a whisk and a spoon

Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Spinach-Mozzarella Pie with Parm Crumble

If you’re wondering how to get cheese and custard and green stuff and pastry all in one dish, the answer is a Spinach-Mozzarella Pie with Parm Crumble! What we have here is basically a spinach quiche dotted with cubes of mozzarella and topped off with a Parmesan-loaded crumble. It’s salty and cheesy and textured and great warm or room temp for any meal of the day.

Last year, I tested the recipes for an upcoming savory baking cookbook and I’ve had an empty par-baked pie shell sitting in the freezer ever since. I almost never bake a full-sized pie for the two of us, but I’ve been itching to reclaim that freezer space (and that pie plate), so when this recipe was nominated, I decided to use the crust here. It’s different than Dorie’s flaky crust, in that it’s a press-in situation with a shortcrust texture, and it’s also in a standard-sized plate instead of a deep dish, but it worked out well in this pie by slightly scaling back the custard amount. Another thing I had in the freezer from those testing days was an almost-full bag of frozen spinach, so I pulled that out, too. Rather than wilting down and squeezing fresh spinach, I thawed the frozen stuff and squeezed the heck out of it before adding it to my sautéed aromatics. Technically, my spinach-to-custard ratio was a bit higher than Dorie’s because I wanted to use up all the spinach that was in the bag. My filling was more like creamy greens and lacked a separate quiche-like layer, but more green stuff is always fine with me. Also, I like a bit of heat, so I added some pepper flake to the filling.

After the spinach mixture and the creamy custard are inside the par-baked shell, on went cubes of mozzarella and lots of parm crumble, and then it was into the oven. I only made 3/4 of the crumble and it still seemed plenty to cover the pie. We’ve had this with a salad the last couple of nights for dinner, and since I made a full-sizer, we can have it for a couple of lunches, too.

If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it twice a month. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Potato-Parm Tart

I made and froze a disk of Savory Galette Dough the other day for this Potato-Parm Tart and then promptly forgot about it. New year, same me. Luckily, if you either have the dough RTG or have a sheet of shop-bough puff pastry kicking around, you can finish the tart off pretty quickly for an on-the-fly lunch. A par-baked round of your chosen crust (this isn’t made in a tart pan, but instead is baked off as a flat disk) gets a schmear of cream cheese, Parmesan and a scattering of something in the allium family. I used leftover sautéed leeks. Then overlapping circles of potatoes sliced on the mandolin, or thin as you can cut them, are spiraled on top and seasoned. Pop it into the oven and then pull it back out 25 minutes later with frilly, bronzed potatoes and a salty, crispy crust. I really wanted to have my slice with a glass of white wine, but stuck to just an arugula salad, since I had to go to the dentist later in the afternoon and felt weird about drinking before a doctor’s appointment. Maybe with a re-toasted leftover sliver to celebrate no new cavities…

If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it twice a month. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!

Tuesdays with Dorie BWD: Pear-Comté Tart

My last two posts were separately about pears and cheese, and now here I am combo’ing the two with this Pear-Comté Tart. It has basically all the good stuff from a cheese plate (cheese, fruit, nuts, cracker, mustard) held together with custard. I really liked the salty, nutty Comté together with pears and walnuts, and I felt very sophisticated enjoying this for a weekend lunch in my sweatpants with some lightly dressed radicchio leaves and a glass of wine.

If you don’t have the book Baking with Dorie: Sweet, Salty & Simple by Dorie Greenspan, get it and join us as we bake through it twice a month. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the TWD Blogroll!