This week’s Cook the Book Fridays is in memory of a fellow member Chez Nana/Ro who sadly passed away in June. Nana baked, blogged, commented on all our posts and even learned coding and photography for her blog at the age of 88. How amazing is that? This recipe – Lower East Side Brunch Tart is a recipe that Nana had nominated in the past. So in honour of her, everyone in the Cook the Book Fridays community is baking this recipe for Nana.

After the entire tart is baked for another hour (recipe says 45 minutes) at 350F the tart is done. Topped with additional dill and capers this recipe was perfect for our al fresco dinner outside.

I loved how easy it was put the recipe together. I “half-baked” the pie crust in the morning and let it cool. Within 20 minutes after returning home from the clay studio I layered the ingredients and put the tart in the oven. We actually had this tart for dinner with additional tomatoes, greens and a mojito each. I love how this tart reminds you of “bagels and lox with the works” as Dorie says in her recipe. For the next time I bake this recipe, I would consider putting quiche-like ingredients inside the tart such as spinach or maybe some ham and place the smoked salmon on top after the tart has been baked.

To make a vegetable tian preheat the oven to 400F. Then coat the bottom of the dutch oven with a few good tablespoons of olive oil. Then generously add salt, cracked pepper, fresh basil and sliced garlic. We also had chopped onions on the bottom of our dish as we had some left over from another dinner dish.

All the veggies are sliced to about 1/4 inch thick. Then the sliced eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, and mushrooms are all layered and nestled into each other. Dorie suggests sandwiching the eggplant slices between slices of tomatoes. Ensure that all the veggies are tightly overlapping each other in a spiral.

You find find the recipe for Dorie’s Summer Vegetable Tian here. Alternatively, you can also purchase the cookbook yourself and find this recipe on page 234! Go check out the Cook the Book Fridays page to see how everyone else did with this recipe, their thoughts and of course the pictures!

Wow, time is flying by. Sorry that I have been neglecting the blogging part lately, though, rest assured I am still doing a lot of baking and recipe testing over on Instagram. After this post, I hope to work on a macaron post! I have been spending some time working on my photography skills, photo editing and making pottery (for food props and more!). Creating my own pottery and glazing them in all sorts of fun colours have been a recent obsession of mine. If you look through these photos you will see some of my pottery pieces! 

Making the pie dough is a breeze. Just process flour, sugar, salt and butter in the food processor until slightly lumpy (as above). Then, roll the pie dough out until it is a wide flat circle. Next, place the dough between two sheets of parchment paper in the refrigerator for at least an hour before using.

For ingredients, Dorie uses Mushrooms, Leek, Green Onion, Onions, Bacon and the addition of walnuts! The walnuts certainly gives the galette a distinctively crunchy bite.

The main ingredients of leeks, green onions, onions and mushrooms are cooked down in a pan before walnuts, bacon and cheese is mixed in.

Then a splash or two of some dry white wine followed by some heavy cream to give the filling additional flavour.

The beauty of a galette is that nothing has to be perfect. Just quickly fold in the dough and it will naturally crease as you go. If it rips, that’s okay too! The dough is so forgiving that no one will notice once it is baked. Everything comes together so fast that you are able to do other things in between. In fact, we had a guest over for dinner and we did all of the dinner prep (and photography shots) while we snacked on appetizers and entertained.

Now that you know how easy it is to make this mushroom bacon galette, you should make one too!  Also, check out how everyone else from Cook the Book Fridays did with this galette!