Tomato Tart

Posted by Ethne~

We have a beautiful bounty of tomatoes coming on right now.  For lunch last Sunday Shaun and I made homemade bruschetta – including French baguette bread I made from scratch Saturday night!!  It was amazing, but naturally I didn’t take any pictures because 1) it was too delicious to remember the camera sitting in front of me and 2) I burned my finger.

Yesterday’s breakfast was a divine use of our tomatoes, too.  I’ve grown grape tomatoes (little teeny ones), cherry tomatoes (small ones) and grape roma tomatoes (small-size romas).  I basically was going after just the right type that the girls could go out to the garden and each the tomatoes right off the vine.  They ADORE tomatoes above all food.

Not sure why my camera flips these pics sometimes!

I’m not sure where my dad found this tomato tart recipe, so it’s pretty much just a Hedren Family Recipe now.  I memorized it the minute I had it, the very first time, because it was that good – and that was when I was home visiting him in college.  Too many years ago to admit.

I’m a fan of homemade pie crust, and it’s super easy, but being lazy, I snatched up a pre-made crust in the refrigerated section of the grocery store on Friday.  Store-bought tastes good, but homemade tastes GREAT.  Trust me on this.  Here’s a good link to an easy recipe until I get around to sharing our family recipe on this blog.  I SWEAR I will get to it one of these days.  I just don’t make pie that often.  Hello calories.

Here’s what you need to buy:

Pie crust (or make!)

Swiss cheese (it needs to be shredded, either buy or do it)

Garlic salt (you don’t need this – salt and pepper will do)

Rosemary (if you have fresh from the garden, use that)

Tomatoes (I used my garden grape romas – any will do)

Parmesan cheese

Olive oil

Here’s what you do:

Lay your pie crust out on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Pie crust has butter/lard/Crisco in it, so it doesn’t need extra grease on the sheet.

With salt and pepper and rosemary added.  It's ok that it hangs over the edge right now.

Add a shake of salt (or garlic salt), several grinds of black pepper and the equivalent of 1 tsp. dried rosemary or 1 T. fresh rosemary.  Dried herbs are always more potent than fresh.

Lay on a nice, thick layer of your shredded Swiss cheese.  Leave about 1.5 inches of the crust cheese-free because we will fold this in to contain the tart before baking.

Swiss-tastic!

Slice and circle the tomatoes on top of the cheese.  I ended up using about 10 of my tomatoes because they were tiny, but if you’re using large tomatoes, I’d say you could use 2-3 or if medium tomatoes, maybe 3-4.

Baby romas.  So cute.  And yummers.

Sprinkle a little more salt and pepper onto the tomatoes; drizzle a TEENY bit of extra virgin olive oil onto the tomatoes (this is for flavor), and add a sprinkle of parmesan cheese.

Now fold in the edges of the crust onto the tomatoes as you see in the picture, making puckers every few inches to keep the circle going – and it also makes it pretty.  If you want it to look super fancy, brush the tart crust with a little cream.  I usually don’t bother with that.

All the deliciousness is contained!

Bake for 40-60 minutes at 350º.  The baking time is the only thing I couldn’t remember (from ancient times), so I basically checked every 5 minutes for the entire hour-long period.  That’s why it’s such a big gap in baking time.  Sorry about that.  It’s much more likely it will be at the hour-long baking time.  What you want is the crust to be golden along the top.

Golden perfection

Slice and eat.  All that were left were crumbs.  KD and Easy Mac told me that they wanted me to make this for breakfast every day.  Nice compliment, but not likely my loves.

We're still working on the 'shovel' technique

Words can't express

I can tell they got my Wolcott and Hedren genes - they love pie crust!

This is seriously DIVINE.  I made it one time with think slices of zucchini and yellow squash instead of tomatoes and it was also super yummy.  If you want to impress your next date, or your significant other on date night, make this and sparks will fly!