Our Thanksgiving tradition (at least as of the past decade or so), is to experiment with new and creative dishes. Each of us takes a hand at making a new dish and we serve these alongside some standardslasagna (we are vegetarian and when we were younger, my mother adopted lasagna as our main course, served alongside sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, corn. In recent years weve tried to bring things other than straight up carbs to the table :).
Among my offerings last year was this lovely spiral vegetable tart. (Its taken me this long to get the recipe up) As I was perusing recipes, I found a beautiful picture on bunsenburnerbakery.com and decided that a spiral veggie tart was what I wanted to make. I made some adjustments, including adding pesto and cheese between each layer.
Crust
You can use whatever pie crust recipe you like. Im a fan of an all-butter pie crust and use vinegar as the primary liquid. For just a single crust, youll want:
- 1/2cup(1 stick) cold butter
- 1 1/4cupsFlour
- 1/2teaspoonSalt
- 2Tablespoons ice cold water or milk
- 1/2teaspoonVinegar
- Put your flour and salt in a mixing bowl.
- Cut your butter into small pieces.
- By hand rub the butter into the flour mixture until you see pea-sized pieces. Dont mix too much. Add your vinegar, and then if you need a little more moisture add in the ice-cold water or milk a little at a time.
- Form it into a ball.
- Wrap with plastic or bee wrap and put in the fridge for at least an hour. Overnight is great.
- Now turn your attention to the veggies.
Vegetable layer
Ingredients
- 1 butternut squash
- 1 eggplant
- 2 zucchinis
- 2-3 carrots (if you dont want to use eggplant, you could use purple carrots or purple sweet potatoes)
- 1 sweet potato, orange or yellow
- 1 C grated cheese (more if you want it really cheesy)
- 1 jar of pesto (you could absolutely use homemade)
- Wash each vegetable.
- Peel the potatoes and butternut squash but leave the peel on the eggplant and zucchini for color.
- Slice each vegetable thinly with a mandolin. You want long, thin strips. Youll have to experimentwith the right thickness.
- Preheat oven to 350. Spread your veggies on a cookie sheet/roasting pan and coat with olive oil.
- Cook veggies until just soft and pliableroughly 15 minutes.
- Now youll need to pause on the veggies and turn back to pie crust. Roll out your pie crust and line it into a pie tin. (I like to roll it out onto parchment paper and put the parchment into the pie tin (less cleanup mess).
- Blind bake your pie crust on 400 for roughly 15 minutes. Good instructions here: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/how-to-blind-bake-pie-crust/
Assembly:
- Spoon or brush some pesto into the pie crust.
- Sprinkle in some grated cheese to form a thin layer.
- Start with a thin strip of veggie. Roll it to form a rosette. Spread a little pesto around a strip of veggies. (the pesto acts as the glue between the layers/keeps it together).
- Roll that strip around the circle. Repeat spreading pesto and layering veggies until you have a 3 round or so.
- Place that in the middle of your pie. Now start wrapping layers of veggies around that circle in concentric circlesuse the same vegetable for each layer.
- Stop when your vegetables come to the edge.
- Push some cheese and pesto between every few layers and then sprinkle some cheese on top (just a little, you want your veggies to be the star of the show.
8. Place the tart on a cookie sheet and bake at 350 until your crust is golden brown.