NICO | GALOPPO || journal

For quite a while now, I’ve been known by friends and relatives to be kind of a foodie. I like talking about food, I like preparing dinner for friends, for myself. It relaxes me. I get great joy of seeing people enjoy (my) food.

Anyway, I must admit that, for some months now, I have a new addiction. I read food blogs. More than half of my RSS feeds list is populated by food blog feeds. It’s an addiction, but not any worse than any other. Or maybe even less so. As Jeffrey Steingarten says in his excellent ‘It must’ve been something I ate’:

Regard and Landis insist upon referring to gourmandism as an “impulse-control problem”. But I see it precisely as the reverse. A person who eats ten bags of potato chips or SnackWell’s cookies in an afternoon has an impulse-control problem. But a person like me, who spends the afternoon — or a week of afternoons — planning the perfect dinner of barbecued ribs or braised foie gras, has clearly mastered his impulses. We passionate eaters elevate, we ennoble the bestial impulse to feed into a sublime activity, into an art, into the art of eating. [...] We transmute what animals do into what the angels would do if angels ate food, which I don’t think they do, at least not in their official capacity.

Anyway, the moment I read about the recipe for Tomato Tartlets with Bacon Pesto on one of my daily reads on the Munich-based food blog delicious:days, I knew I wanted to try it out as soon as possible. Something about the pictures on delicious:days is just so appealing, that I can’t stop thinking of recreating the dish in its utter simplicity. With these tomato tartlets, I made my own personal version, omitting the bacon — as I was cooking for a partial crowd of vegetarians — and giving them some extra zing by tucking the sweet cherry tomatoes onto a dollop of my home-made rucola pesto. They came out great, and I feel I was successful at recreating the look that I had admired from the pictures at delicious:days. Check this flickr photoset for a visual reconstruction of putting these Tomato Rucola-Pesto Tartlets together.

The recipe is incredibly easy, click below to find out.

Tomato Rucola-Pesto Tartlets (yields about 20 tartlets)

Ingredients (adapted from delicious:days)

• a box of (frozen) puff pastry
• rucola pesto (use a traditional pesto recipe, substitute rucola for basil)
• a ball of good mozzarella, torn
• freshly ground black pepper
• 3-4 tbsp olive oil
• 6-12 cherry tomatoes (depending on their size)
• pine nuts for decoration
• fresh thyme
• olive oil to drizzle over
• coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 190°C (375°F). Roll out the (defrosted) puff pastry and cut/stamp into individual circles or rectangles. My circles had about 7cm (3inch) in diameter. Scoring the puff pastry with a sharp knife along the border and pricking the center with a fork allows the sides to puff up nicely during the bake, while the center stays flat.
2. Add a teaspoon of the pesto mixture on to each tart base, leaving a good-size edge. Halve cherry tomatoes, arrange on top, add some mozzarella shreds and drizzle some olive oil and fresh thyme leaves over tarts, add a few pine nuts and place on parchment paper (This is what it looks like before going into the oven).
3. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until the tart crust turns golden brown. Remove from oven and drizzle with the mix of basil leaves and olive oil. Season with sea salt and black pepper to taste, if desired. They’re delicious served both warm and cold.