Vegetable Tarts

I love tarts, more specifically, vegetable tarts. I prefer their heartier flavors to their fruit counterparts that tend to get watery as they extrude all their juices while cooking. I ate vegetable tarts from time to time before I moved to France, but they have now become a staple in my kitchen. Tarts just seem to be a terribly French thing; they can be seasonal and add flare to an ordinary vegetable. I can’t point to just one thing about them, but there is really something about vegetable tarts that I can’t seem to get enough of.

In summer, there are zucchini tarts, followed by tomato and onion tarts. In the fall, there is a potiron tart, which is like a pumpkin and the only tart that slides into my annual lineup that is more sweet than savory. By winter, potatoes are sliced and stuffed between pastry dough and topped off with a quick spoon of crème fraîche. Spring rolls around and leeks and asparagus are given my full attention. What’s not to like about them? Nature has given me an endless array of things to put into pastry crust – and they’re all good.

Tarts are not a pie, and it is more than just the shallower pan that defines that. It appears the delicateness of them, along with the balance of pastry and filling, that does. In a pie, the filling takes center stage, but a tart seems to strike a balance between the two. Maybe that’s the French thing about it, “tart for dinner” sounds a bit more sophisticated than “pie for dinner”. There is a duality of indulgence with sensibility, which seems to work. So when asked, ‘Do you want a leek tart for dinner?” My only response could be, ‘Don’t mind if I do!”