Pea and Broad Bean Tart

Back in the summer, when we went to Clumber Park, I had a pea, broad bean and brie tart which was extremely delicious. I marked it as something I could serve to vegetarians which was a bit out of the ordinary. A change from goats cheese, ricotta and spinach!

We were going to visit Freyja at the weekend and I thought i might make a variant on it to take with us. I remembered that the Clumber Park tart was a little dry and neither Freyja nor The Builder is especially partial to brie, so I decided to make small tarts with a cheese sauce. I made the cheese sauce with quite a lot of red leicester

So. I took peas and beans from the freezer, and lightly simmered them. Then I removed the skins from the broad beans. In the meantime I had made some shortcrust pastry. I stirred the peas and beans through the cooled cheese sauce, rolled the pastry and lined some small aluminium pie cases, filled the pies with the cheesy mix and topped it with a vegetarian friendly Parmesan style hard cheese and baked them in a moderate oven for about 30 minutes or so. Then we packed the car and took the pies to London for lunch with Freyja.

The pies were extremely lovely but very filling. The left over cheesy mix made an excellent addition to some minced pork I was using to make a quick pork and noodle supper when we came back home.

I still had quite a lot of peas and beans left over, so decided to make another tart to have for our lunches this week. The intention had been to make a pea and bean quiche, but I blind baked the pastry for the tart and all the quiche mix ran out when I tried to put it in :-S  So I topped the peas and beans with grated red leicester and parmesan style cheese and baked it without the quiche mixture, and made a baked savoury custard separately to go on the side.

I must remember these tart variants.  They were all really lovely and certainly do make interesting things to offer to vegetarians

Pea, broad bean and cheese tart

Lunch, with a serving of baked savoury custard on the side