This beautiful recipe, or rather photo of drool worthy food, has been floating around Pinterest for a bit. What’s the hold up? It’s in Russian. My pal Natasha over at Alaska Knit Nat had a friend translate some of the recipe with a translator and ended up with things like “butter sauce.” So, no one is much closer to making this beautiful thing…So I bribed kindly asked my friend Sergios to translate the ingredients for me as he is super cool and speaks both Russian and Greek (go team Cyprus!).
From there I approached this a bit like a British Bake Off technical challenge. Read: Imma make this up! Sort of.
- Make your pie crust
- Mix 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour, 2 tsp sugar, 3/4 tsp salt in a bowl
- Cut in 2 full sticks of butter. (Yeah. 2 sticks. No one ever said vegetables were healthy.) until you have a nice mealy mix.
- Add 9 – 12 TB of ice cold water and mix until the dough holds when pressed. Don’t over mix or your pastry will be tough. And ain’t nobody got time for that.
- Wrap/cover in cling film and pop in the refrigerator
- Run out of the house in your flour covered shirt to go to the expensive (but very cool) housewares store in rush hour traffic. Buy spring form pan because even after all these years, you still don’t have one. And believe me – this veggie tart won’t be nearly as cool if you can’t see the whole thing.
- Dig out your butcher glove (the Michael Jackson thing you use when filleting allthefish so you won’t cut your hand off) and prep the mandolin. Slice 1 full green zucchini, 1 full yellow zucchini squash, 2 potatoes, half a beet and some carrots. Realize the carrots don’t cut as nicely as you would like, and feed some to the dog.
- After your dough has chilled for at least an hour, remove from the fridge, roll, pack and blind bake for 15 minutes at 375*. I’m too cheap to own weights, so dried kidney beans and tin foil won the day. Why do we blind bake? No soggy bottoms!
- Cool your pastry for 10 minutes, and begin layering your veggies in the mold.
After your veggies look super pretty, set aside and begin making your cheese sauce. I did not have Sergios translate the entire recipe (my bribe powers have limits) but from the photo, it looks like a modified cheese sauce.
- Grate a lot of cheese – like 2 1/2 cups or so. I used 3/4 pepper jack and 1/4 cheddar. It was what we had – I don’t judge.
- Begin your roux – 1 -2 TB of melted butter with 2 -3 TB of flour, yadda yadda. (If you don’t know how to make a roux – go forth to Google)
- Slowly add 1 1/2 cups of milk, stir until thick, begin adding portions of cheese and stir until melted and all is incorporated.
- Add a few TB of water because of course you made the cheese sauce too thick. Salt, pepper, and cayenne to taste.
- Feel terrible you are about to pour this stuff all over your pretty vegetables.
- Bake for 45 minutes – 1 hour at 375* – until the pie is set.
While you are waiting for the pie to cook, snack on some salmon spread leftover from last night’s onigiri. Have 3 or 4 slices, because it’s snacking.
Allow your pie to cool for about an hour – you want all that stuff to set and congeal before you hack into it and it all comes rushing out….Make sure someone in your house asks “Is it ready yet? Can we eat it?” every 15 minutes.
Cut, serve and send photos to your friends. This thing turned out amazingly well and it is definitely making it in to our meal rotation. Seriously. Super good.
annie.crafty.pants 