Thursday, August 30, 2007

Torta di Pomodori!

This month's theme for the 'Fresh Produce of the Month' event, hosted by myself, is 'Tomatoes'.. As you can imagine given the fact that I chose the theme, I absolutely love tomatoes. Coming to Berkeley was a great surprise at this regard. I found so many varieties of tomatoes, with colors ranging from yellow to orange to red, which I had never seen in my whole life. You can look here for pictures of a few of the tomatoes I see every week at the Berkeley Bowl.
So to celebrate such a local and great variety of tomatoes, I chose to use a recipe from a book called 'San Francisco flavors'. I received this book for my birthday, and I already tried a few recipes from it, and they were all a great success. This time I chose an 'Artichoke and cherry tomato tart'- it was so simple and quick to make, that I decided it could be our regular dinner for tonight, instead of waiting for a special occasion with guests in order to make it..

Torta di pomodori e carciofini / Artichoke and tomato tart
Ingredients
1 sheet pastry dough (I used a frozen one)
2 eggs
1/2 cup sour cream
3/4 spoon dried thyme (I used oregano)
1 1/2 cups marinated artichoke hearts
1 small red onion (I used half a yellow one)
20 cherry tomatoes (I used the hairloom variety)
Procedure
Roll the pastry dough enough so that it covers a 12-inch tart pan. Butter and flour the pan and place the dough in it. Prepare a mixture by whisking the eggs, the sour cream, the thyme (oregano), salt and pepper (I used ~1 1/2 teaspoons each). Spread 1/4 of this mixture on the dough. Add the artichoke hearts and the onion, finely cut. Then place the tomatoes cut in half, and spoon the rest of the mixture on top.
Bake at 450 F for ~15-20 min. Cool down before serving.
The tart is very good, and you really taste the flavor from the tomatoes a lot. I didn't care for the artichoke hearts. Maybe I didn't have a really good brand for them, but in any case, they didn't seem to add much to the tart. Moreover, they didn't help making the tart less moist (it's quite soft and moist from the tomatoes).. so next time I will devote this cake just to the celebration of the tomato flavor!
Now.. doesn't this recipe inspire you to take part to the 'Tomato' event this month?!? The deadline is September 2nd, and you can find the rules here!

2 comments:

Finla said...

Delicious looking.
I do like artichoke, mostly it tends to be in pizzas

chemcookit said...

Thanks, I'm glad you like it! - I usually love artichokes too.. I guess really it was this brand I used that wasn't too good.