Where I grew up, it is 85 degrees, dry, and sunny, nearly every day, from May to October. It is always salad weather, never oven weather. Applying heat to cook your summer tomatoes seems sacrilege when you can merely slice, salt, and eat.

Yet I have found in other parts of the world, the weather likes to mess with my plans for my summer market haul. For instance: a couple of weeks ago, I bought a few eggplants and a big punnet of cherry tomatoes, planning to grill the former and slice the latter. Then it rained around dinner time every day for nearly a week. Grilling eggplant was out of the question. The tomatoes, languishing in my fruit bowl, began to look questionable.

 

This Ottolenghi recipe (from Plenty, which I just got around to buying, five years after the rest of the world) solved my problem: what do you do when you have summer produce, but crummy weather? And since the produce gets roasted and therefore doesn’t need to be quite as top-notch as for a salad, I imagine it would also do a good job sating winter cravings for summer produce, as well.

  

This is weekend cooking: you need to first roast the veg, then bake the crust, and finally assemble and bake the whole thing altogether with the cream, eggs, and cheese. But the payoff is big. You could serve it for a dinner party, along with a green salad, a baguette, and maybe some green beans, or you could have it all to yourself, eating one slice on the first night and enjoying the leftovers for the rest of the week. Either way, you’ll love the big summer veg flavors, even—or maybe especially–when the weather is looking a bit more like early spring.

 

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Vegetable-laden tart

Serves 6, with a side salad or veg
Adapted slightly for time, timing, and quantity from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty

Ingredients

1 red bell pepper
1 yellow bell pepper (for color–you can just do 2 red or 2 yellow if that’s all you can find)
6ish tablespoons olive oil
1 medium eggplant, cut into 2-inch dice
salt and black pepper
1 small sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1-inch dice
1 small zucchini, cut into 1-inch dice
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
11-12.5 oz pie crust dough (see note at bottom of recipe)
8 thyme sprigs, leaves picked
1/3 cup ricotta
4 1/4 ounces feta
7-12 cherry tomatoes, halved
2 medium eggs
1 cup heavy cream

Instructions

Preheat the oven to 450F. Cut around the stem of the peppers to remove the stems and seeds. Place the two peppers in a small ovenproof dish or baking pan and put on the top shelf in the oven.

Mix the eggplant in a bowl with 1/4 cup or so of the olive oil and some salt and pepper. Spread in a large baking pan and place in the oven on the shelf beneath the peppers.

After 12 minutes add the sweet potato dice to the eggplant pan and stir gently. Return to the oven to roast for another 12 minutes. Then add the zucchini to the pan, stir and roast for a further 10 to 12 minutes. At this point the peppers should be brown/burnt on the skin, and the rest of the vegetables should be cooked. Remove all from the oven and reduce the temperature to 325 degrees. Once the peppers cool, peel them (discard those burnt skins) and tear the peppers into chunks.

While the veg is in the oven, put remaining olive oil in a frying pan on medium heat. Saute the onions with some salt for 25 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they turn brown, soft and sweet. (If things start to stick, you can always chuck a small splash of water in the pan.) Remove from the heat and set aside.

Lightly grease a 9-inch loose-bottomed tart pan. Roll out the pie crust dough to a circle roughly 1/8 inch thick and large enough to line the pan, plus extra to hang over the rim. Carefully line the pan with the dough: put the center of the dough in the center of the pan, then work outward to press it into the corners, leaving any excess to hang slightly over the top edge. (Holes in your crust? Just patch them up with additional dough. Most of it is going to get filled, so nobody will know. Call it “rustic.”)

Line the dough with either a large sheet of parchment paper, filled with pie weights or dried beans, or with tin foil. Bake the crust for 25-30 minutes. Carefully remove the paper with the weights or the foil, then bake for 5 to 15 minutes more. Mine took maybe 5 more minutes—just watch for it to turn a light golden brown. Remove and allow to cool a little.

While the tart crust is cooling, whisk the eggs and cream in a small bowl with some salt and pepper.

Assemble your tart. Scatter the cooked onion over the bottom of the crust and top with the roasted vegetables, arranging them evenly. Scatter half the thyme over. Next, dot the veg with small chunks of both cheeses and then with the tomato halves, cut-side up. Pour the egg and cream mix into the tart; the top layer of tomatoes and cheese should remain exposed. Scatter the remaining thyme over the top.

Place in the oven and bake for 35 to 55 minutes (see note below), or until the filling sets and turns golden. (You can check for this by giving the pan a slight back-and-forth shake—it’ll be done when you see very little or no movement in the center of the tart.) Remove and allow to rest for at least 10 minutes before releasing the tart from the pan and serving.

Note

A few things happened in the cooking process that have led me to believe that my tart pan was slightly bigger (or perhaps taller) than the 9-inch pan the recipe called for.

First, this took more than the 11 ounces of pie crust the recipe called for–more like 12.5. I rolled out one 7-ounce piece of dough, then rolled out the other 7-ounce piece of dough in a slightly overlapping fashion, so as to create one bigger piece of dough. (Like I said: “rustic.”)
Second, the crust took less time to cook–presumably because I rolled it thinner over a bigger tin than Ottolenghi did.
Third, the tart filling took longer to cook–a full 55 minutes to get it really set, as opposed to the 35-45 indicated.
Fourth, unlike other bloggers, I did not have a ton of leftover filling–just enough to make one, adorable, 2.5-inch tartelette. (If you do have a fair amount of leftover filling veg and egg, I imagine baking it, sans crust, in a little ovenproof dish such as a small Pyrex, would work well.)

All of this is to say: the amount of filling and crust is going to depend on how big your tart tin is. I think it’s better to have too much, and bake off the excess in a small glass dish, than too little, and have a sad, under-filled tart, so I’ve left the ingredient list largely as written in Plenty. Now you know!