Dinner with Friends

Often during the work week I daydream all day long about cooking, peruse recipes online at lunch hour and break, fantasize about just calling it a day and going home to my kitchen.  Often by the time I do get home, I'm beat and there's homework, yardwork, laundry to all take up my time.  It's another round of grilled cheese or quick pasta--the new recipes shelved for another time. 

But . . .every once in a while there is a day where I finally had the time and the opportunity to try out some new things.  Whenever I have extra adventurous souls round the table it's a wonderful opportunity to finally give those recipes a whirl.  Tonight we had lentil salad tossed with a Georgian cilantro sauce, a quinoa salad with balsamic vinagrette, some wonderful roasted squash and apples ala Mario Batali and to finish, an apple frangipane tart.  ( I realize re-reading that I should give credit where credit is due to some wonderful braised beef and grilled chicken that John prepared too)

I first heard this tart recipe on NPR, and it sounded amazing.  However, when I printed out the full instructions off their website it ran to three full pages and took a little over two days to make.  I simplified because dinner was in three hours.  This is what my version came down to:

Start with a simple pastry crust, pressed into a 8-9 inch tart pan--I used the basic version from the old Better Homes and Gardens cookbook.  Blind bake this for 8-10 minutes, until it starts to look palely golden, but nowhere near cooked.

Fill that up with this, which has a lot of ingredients but is pretty dang zippy in a food processor:

1 cup (4 ounces) blanched slivered almonds
1/2 cup (3 1/2 ounces) granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup crystallized ginger, minced
1/4 cup dried cranberries, minced
1 large egg
1 large egg white
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
6 tablespoon unsalted butter, cut into 6 pieces and softened to room temp.

I used whole almonds with the skins on, which made a more nubbly sort of texture but all in all did give me an epiphinal "aha" moment.  This stuff is darn close to what you might have inside a good quality almond croissant.    Start with the almonds and the sugar, reduce those to a nice sandy texture, and then keep adding a couple more ingredients and incorporating them until you have a nice uniform paste.  Spread this into your tart shell.

At this point, I topped this all with a pretty layer of sliced apples (about two small apples worth), but I think one could easily use plums or apricots.  Bake all this in the oven until it looks pretty and browned up nicely--20-30 minutes.  The almond filling will puff around the fruit a little.

Definitely a nice "ta-da" kind of dessert to bring out for a party, and probably one to save for a good sized party at that, because I do suspect there may be a calorie or to lurking there.