alice’s posterous

There are straightforward, easy recipes using seasonal fruits and vegetables with funny comments. Now, on the market just one minute away from where I live, they are now selling beautiful spinach leaves:

I used them to make this beautiful Spinachio pie from the recipe book:

first make the pastry:
mix 100g wholemeal flour, 100g white flour and a pinch of salt into a bowl. Rub 100g butter into the flour mixture to breadcrumb consistency and gradually add enough cold water until the pastry sticks together. If the pastry is too watery, add flour until you obtain the right consistency. Then leave it to rest for an hour or so. Preheat the oven to 200 degres.

Cook the spinach:

wash the spinach leaves.

Then place them in a saucepan with a lid and steam the spinach for 5 minutes or so. When it's steamed, drain the spinach to extract as much liquid as possible.

Blind bake the pastry for 10 minutes. While the pastry is baking, separate an egg and whisk the white lightly with a fork. Take the pastry out of the oven and pour the whisked egg white into the base. Swish it around until it is covered, then pop the pastry back into the oven for a few more minutes to set the white. This will stop the pastry going snoggy when you put in the filling.

Make the filling:
Beat 225g cream cheese (ricotta, curd cheese, quark, fromage frais...) with 2 eggs and the yolk from the other egg. Add salt, pepper, nutmeg, the well-drained spinach and 25g grated cheese (parmesan, gruyere, cheddar...).

Pour the filling into the pastry case. Scatter 25g of grated cheese over the top.

Bake for 30 minutes or until set.

You can eat this delicious pie as a starter or main dish:

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In my previous post, I mentioned that pumpkins were in season (well, at least on the stalls on the market place next to where I live!). So I bought half of an enormous pumpkin and of course I had to carve it, cut it and peel it! I used part of it in small chunks for my creamy mushroomy chicken casserole. The easiest was for me to first scoop out the stringy insides and seeds, then cut the pumpkin into medium chunks and to peel each chunk. The outer skin is so though, I think it is too difficult to peel everything at once.

With the other part of half of my pumpkin (which results to a quarter of a pumpkin!), I decided to go for a pumpkin pie without the crust, so this basically became a pumpkin flan! It was a bit flat but still very tasty!

For the recipe, I more or less followed the guidelines from the video below, except I added a bit of ginger and vanilla essence and instead of the milk or cream, I added quark (cream cheese). You can find more details about the ingredients and how to carve a pumpkin here.

What about you? What is your favourite pumpkin recipe?

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My dad (@jfayel on Twitter) bought a huge box of strawberries so me and my mum ( @nanouk on Twitter) decided to make a strawberry tart using mascarpone as the filling.

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