I’ve been following a low sugar diet for the last few weeks and bought the book I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson, which is full of healthy recipes. Weekend lunches are probably the meals where I struggle most to come up with dishes – my fiancé would have a bacon sandwich every Saturday and every Sunday if he could, but I prefer to cook different things and at the moment I’m not really eating bread so that doesn’t work for me at all.
I found a recipe in I Quit Sugar for quinoa and pumpkin tarts which I knew my fiancé would never eat, so I decided to do him a cheese and bacon tart on a pastry base to use up some shortcrust pastry I had in the freezer. For myself, I followed the recipe but scaled it down as I didn’t need it to serve 4. I also used butternut squash instead of pumpkin, and agave nectar instead of rice malt syrup. I also realised I didn’t have any parmesan so used a little gruyere instead, along with the blue cheese and ricotta.
It was a bit fiddly to make as you have to rinse the quinoa first then cook it, then let it cool and form a ‘pie crust’ and then bake it blind, while cooking the butternut squash at the same time. The quinoa created a surprisingly good base for the tart and it was really tasty – butternut squash and blue cheese is a nice flavour combination and the creaminess of the ricotta was a lovely addition. I don’t know whether I’d go to the lengths of making these again but I think if I was soaking and cooking quinoa for a couple of recipes at the same time, eg a salad for lunch at work and then these tarts the next day, then it would be well worth the effort.
Mixing the quinoa with the cheese and egg:
I used a mixture of loose-bottomed tart tins and, because I couldn't find where my cleaner had put the bottoms to the other ones, some mini foil pie dishes. Here they are about to go in the oven.
The base is baked, so adding the topping
Just out of the oven
Serve with lots of green salad
I'm sharing this with Meat Free Mondays, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes