"Elizabethan" vegetable tarte

A couple of days ago, I blogged about an Elizabethan pea tarte which I made for my current Futurelearn course. Whilst I liked the outcome, I have since reflected on what worked or didn't work and how it might be improved.  In this case, I chose to use a mixture of vegetables.  I put the vegetables (apart from the peas into the microwave at full pelt for one minute.  If you don't want to use a microwave you could steam them briefly.

I chose not to microwave the peas this time as I felt with the other recipe that modern frozen baby peas simply didn't need the extra cooking. So next time I make the pea tarte I won't do pre-cooking of the peas. I also chose this time to add the verjuice to the vegetables at the beginning and to have a closed pastry top and not to do two stages of cooking.  I found that this worked well and the vegetables probably stayed a bit moister.  But maybe this is my modern taste speaking.

Ingredients

Sweet potato
Cauliflower
Green peas frozen
Unsalted butter
Pepper
Cayenne
Cummin
Puff pastry
Verjuice



Mode

Preheat oven to 180c
If pastry frozen, remove to thaw
Slice sweet potato into fairly thin rounds
Break cauliflower into small flowerlets
Place cauliflower and sweet potato in souffle dishes
Sprinkle with pepper, cayenne and cummin
Place in microwave for one minute
Remove from microwave and add frozen peas
Add about 2 tsp sweet i.e. unsalted butter to each dish
Sprinkle verjuice into each dish
Cut the pastry into size for each dish

Place the pastry on the top of each souffle dish
Cook in the oven for 45 minutes