Puff Pastry

Palmiers, sometimes called palm leaves, are made with puff pastry folded several times, then sliced, to create a distinctive heart-shaped coil design. Ginger syrup and spiced sugar make these crisp French cookies festive and fragrant.

By adding a puff pastry top, Chef Albert Bouchard transforms an easy autumn vegetable soup into a first course suitable for company. The puff pastry seals in all the aromas until diners breach the flaky caps with their spoons. Note that you will need individual ovenproof soup crocks, similar to the type used for French onion soup. The diameter on top should be no more than 5 inches to have the proper ratio of soup to pastry. Chef Bouchard attended the 2006 Workshop.

Canadian chef Rob Feenie made this savory tart during the 2002 Workshop. Unlike quiche with its custard filling, the classic tarte flambée topping includes no egg—just fromage blanc thinned with crème fraîche, sweet sautéed onions, and smoky bacon. The name (“flaming tart”) derives from earlier times, when cooks would bake it near the embers of a wood-fired oven.

Using store-bought puff pastry allows you to make these tarts on a busy weeknight. Round out the vegetarian meal with a salad of mixed greens or any of the winter vegetable sides on page 279.

WHY IT’S LIGHT One crust makes this tart less fattening than a more traditional (read: double-crust) summer pie. It has a higher proportion of peak-season fruit, another bonus for the calorie conscious. Nectarines are featured, but plums, peaches, apricots, or any mixture of stone fruits would work beautifully here.

The fact is, I could come up with a hundred different cajeta recipes. Cajeta, a caramel-like spread traditionally made with goat’s milk, is readily available all over Mexico and is known as dulce de leche in other parts of Latin America. Cajeta, which translates as “small box,” used to refer to the box in which the cajeta was sold. Now you can find it in a glass jar, a much more convenient presentation. It is found in many supermarkets and Latin markets and is available in different flavors, the most common being wine and strawberry. Any flavored cajeta would work well in this recipe. Whipped with cream and a little sugar, it is a perfectly sweetened filling for this tasty treat—which is just as delightful as it is messy to eat.

If you don’t want to go through the trouble of baking the puff-pastry tart, just serve this wonderful chutney alongside the goat cheese for your guests to spread on crackers. I always have the chutney on hand to stir into hummus or to slather onto a piece of grilled chicken. The creamy goat cheese is the perfect counterpoint to the smoky-sweet chutney.

These guys are spicy! If you’re afraid of the heat, you can use güero chiles, but jalapeños are exactly the right size for an appetizer. Oaxaca cheese, like mozzarella, is a mild-flavored white cheese that is excellent for melting. It’s popular for quesadillas in Mexico.

When it comes to cocktail food, I like one-biters and I like things that are dainty and beautiful. These pretty little tarts fit that bill and more. They taste as fantastic as they look. I prefer to use black-olive tapenade because of its richness, but you can certainly try green-olive, which is tangier.

I make these sweet and savory tarts all year round as a first course or served with a salad as a light lunch. The onions take on a lovely blushing red color when they caramelize. Shake it up with a SAZERAC (see page 28)

These are little golden pyramids of puff pastry with a savory filling of smoked duck, sausage, and apple, served with a tart cider sauce. When it comes to entertaining, these packets can be made a day in advance and baked right before serving. Garnish with a scattering of pretty celery leaves.

Like the asparagus tart that’s a harbinger of spring (see page 69), this mushroom-topped variation is a crowd-pleaser. It makes a lovely dinner, or, when cut into bite-size pieces, a perfect hors d’oeuvre for a cocktail party.

We like Granny Smith apples for this tart, but you could substitute a number of other varieties, including Macoun, Cortland, or Jonagold.

Although it takes just minutes to put together, this savory tart makes an impressive main course. A simple green salad completes the meal. The tart is also a lovely addition to a buffet or a potluck.

These turnovers are delicious! Plus, they’re quick to make and everyone loves them. When you’re making them, be sure to put only a few cherries and a little bit of sauce in each one; otherwise, they’ll be really hard to close and they’ll leak all over the place.

My roommate recently made this for a party we were having and was surprised that something so tasty and fancy looking could be so easy to make. Everyone loved it and was impressed that she had made it. It travels well, too. Combined with a side salad, it makes for a nice lunch.

The easy availability of butter in America was a boon for my mother, who saw endless possibilities for perfecting French pâtés chaud, large puff pastry rounds filled with an aromatic meat mixture. She regularly made the rich pastries from scratch, and they were standard breakfast fare for my siblings and me growing up. As adults, we have scaled back our consumption, making the pastries smaller and serving them as finger food on special occasions. Shaping tiny round pastries is laborious, so we form logs and cut them into diamonds. Unlike my mom, I don’t have the patience or time to make my own puff pastry. Instead, I rely on a local bakery for frozen sheets of all-butter puff pastry or use the frozen puff pastry sold at supermarkets. The latter are usually sold two sheets to a box, with each sheet weighing about 1/2 pound and measuring about ten inches square.

Onions make an important contribution to the filling of pies, providing a sweet balance for the savoriness of the meat and a necessary change of texture, too. A meat pie with no onions would be hard going. I rarely make a meat pie. It is one of those recipes I reserve for a cold autumn day, when it’s too wet to go out.