Recipe: Courgette, Bacon and Blue Cheese Tart

To round off Bacon Week, what better ingredient to use than some lovely, salty, crisp bacon. Rather than a greasy (but delicious) bacon butty, this is a low-fat, simple dish. You can replace the courgette with any vegetables that are left over in your fridge. The saltiness of the bacon and the sharpness of the blue cheese blend really well with the smooth and subtle custard. And the best bit? The tart is even nicer when warmed up the next day.

Ingredients

Pastry

225g Plain flour

½ tsp Baking powder

50g Vegetable oil

4tblsp Cold water

Milk/egg for a wash

Filling

1 Courgette

1 Onion

1 Garlic clove

3 Rashers of bacon (chopped into bitesize pieces)

Ham stock

100g Blue cheese

200ml Crème fraiche

2 Eggs

Preheat the oven to 210C.

Mix together the 225g of plain flour and the baking powder. Mix together the 50g of vegetable oil and 4tblsp of cold water. Then add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients – mixing the water/oil mix and flour mix until completely blended to make a pliable pastry
 
Tip: Pastry is notoriously difficult to make, but I find cold hands helps, and try to work the pastry as little as possible. This keeps it light and pliant, but not stiff. So run them under a cold tape, or just pour yourself a glass of cold rose while you're making this (you should do that anyway).

Flour your work surface and turn out the pastry, rolling out to a size that fits your tart dish. Transport the pastry to the pie dish on your rolling pin, once you have pressed it into the corners you can roll the pin over the top of the dish to cut off extra pastry.

Then, wash your pastry with either blended egg or milk using a pastry brush, and then bake blind (this means unfilled!) for 15 minutes, until it is golden.

While the pastry is baking mix up 100ml of ham (or vegetable) stock and let cool.

Fry finely chopped onion and garlic for 4 minutes on a low heat, before adding the chopped bacon. Fry for 1 minute, then take off the heat. Chop the courgette into halved slices and add to the warm pan (with the heat still off).

By this point (if you potter around the kitchen as much as I do!) the case should be ready to take out of the oven. Remove and fill with the bacon, onion, garlic and courgette mix.

Crumble the blue cheese over the mixture, and then toss gently together

Take the cooled ham stock and add the 200ml of crème fraiche and mix quickly to blend. When completely blended add two eggs and whisk

Pour the mixed liquid over the top of the filled tart.

Cook at 180 C for 35-40 minutes until golden-brown on top.

Then eat!

Louise balances her many daydreams with the reality of being an animal scientist. So by day she’s lab-coated and covered in animal bits and by night she’s a knitter, obsessive reader, cat-botherer and midnight baker. She lives in Yorkshire with a husband, bunnies and cats. She loves PJ Harvey, pastel hair and drinks cola obsessively.