Christmas Vegetable Tart

Freyja has reminded me that I forgot to tell you about the vegan Christmas tart!

We had two vegans, one vegetarian and two people who eat very little meat coming for Christmas dinner.  Belinda was bringing a nut loaf. Ian was planning a vegetarian paella.  Freyja and I were scanning through some foodie magazines and saw a vegetarian friendly puff party tart which looked delicious and which could easily be veganised.

So on Christmas morning I took a baking tray out of the cupboard outside our room.  I layered it with non-buttery puff pastry.  I sauteed some leeks and layered them on the pastry.  I fried some zucchini slices and added them.  I added red and green slices of capsicum.  I put nutritional yeast in some almond milk with pepper and corn flour and made a savoury custard.  I added this to the tart and scattered some dukkah over the top and lastly added some soya cheese.  Freyja made stars and Christmas trees and decorations out of pastry and scattered them over the top.  It looked beautiful.

We went to put it in the oven to bake. And discovered that the baking tray was approximately half a centimetre too long for the oven.  It didn't matter what we did or how we tried to fit it in, it wasn't going to go.

Time was ticking along.  We couldn't slide it onto a slightly smaller tray.  We couldn't pick it up.  Everything that we tried to do made the tart fall apart.

In the end there was nothing for it but to start again.  This time, however, there was no layering, no pretty effects, no savoury custard.  We just grabbed everything and shoved it onto new sheets of pastry that we had put onto an oven friendly baking tray.  Freyja did salvage some the pastry stars and trees.

But let this be a lesson to you.  If you find some nice looking, unused baking trays in a cupboard where you expect to find the disused kitchen stuff, check to see why they might have been put there before using them for an important event.  Oh - and line your baking tray with baking parchment.  If I had done that I would almost certainly have been able to move the tart to another tray!!