Barefoot Bloggers - Tomato and Goat Cheese Tarts

I feel like all I've been making lately are desserts so this week's (or if you want to get all high and mighty with me....last week's) BB choice was a nice change.  Actually, more than nice.  

These were delicious.  And I loved the versatility.  These little tarts are open to anything.  Hussies.

Once again, Ina pulled out the puff pastry, which makes these so simple to put together.  A perfect little last minute appetizer for an impromptu cocktail gathering, or throw in a salad and you've got yourself a light Spring dinner.

I chose to make mine smaller than Ina called for so that I could experiment with a couple of different topings.  If I was going to serve these as an appetizer, I'd make them even a little smaller so they were just a couple of bites, but these came out fine.

I tried them with the suggested goat cheese and fresh roma tomatoes, goat cheese and sundried tomatoes, feta and roasted red peppers, and finally, mozzarella and fresh roma tomatoes.  All of them were delicious, but since I have a love affair with sundried tomatoes, that one was my favorite.   Second choice would have to be the feta and roasted pepper combination.  

I can't wait to try these again this summer after a trip to the farmer's market.  Some nice sweet summer tomatoes would really make these "perfect"!!

You have to try these.  Really.  You have to.

Here's the recipe:

Tomato and Goat Cheese Tarts

2008, Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics, All Rights Reserved

Show: Barefoot ContessaEpisode: Say Cheese

Ingredients:

1 package (17.3 ounces/2 sheets) puff pastry, defrosted
Good olive oil
4 cups thinly sliced yellow onions (2 large onions)
3 large garlic cloves, cut into thin slivers
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons dry white wine
2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme leaves
4 tablespoons freshly grated Parmesan, plus 2 ounces shaved with a vegetable peeler
4 ounces garlic-and-herb goat cheese (recommended: Montrachet)
1 large tomato, cut into 4 (1/4-inch-thick) slices
3 tablespoons julienned basil leaves

Directions:

Unfold a sheet of puff pastry on a lightly floured surface and roll it lightly to an 11 by 11-inch square. Using a 6-inch wide saucer or other round object as a guide, cut 2 circles from the sheet of puff pastry, discarding the scraps. Repeat with the second pastry sheet to make 4 circles in all. Place the pastry circles on 2 sheet pans lined with parchment paper and refrigerate until ready to use.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.

Heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil in a large skillet over medium to low heat and add the onions and garlic. Saute for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring frequently, until the onions are limp and there is almost no moisture remaining in the skillet. Add 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/4 teaspoon pepper, the wine, and thyme and continue to cook for another 10 minutes, until the onions are lightly browned. Remove from the heat.

Using a sharp paring knife, score a 1/4-inch-wide border around each pastry circle. Prick the pastry inside the score lines with the tines of a fork and sprinkle a tablespoon of grated Parmesan on each round, staying inside the scored border.

Place 1/4 of the onion mixture on each circle, again staying within the scored edge. Crumble 1 ounce of goat cheese on top of the onions. Place a slice of tomato in the center of each tart. Brush the tomato lightly with olive oil and sprinkle with basil, salt, and pepper. Finally, scatter 4 or 5 shards of Parmesan on each tart.

Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown. The bottom sheet pan may need an extra few minutes in the oven. Serve hot or warm.

Of course, the wonderful Anne Strawberry chose this recipe.  Thanks to her.  Check out her site if you haven't already done so....she's one of the best.

We all get by with a little help from friends and family

Good looking group, eh?  It runs in the family!  That's me with a couple of my cousins (I have A LOT of them) at my nephew's wedding in September, 2007.  That's Cal on the left and Eric on the right.  And the reason for this post is to conjure up some positive mojo for Cal.  He was recently diagnosed with Mantle Cell Lymphoma which is a nasty type of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma and he's got a tough fight ahead of him.

But he can, and will, fight the good fight because he's got a great attitude, a little twisted sense of humor and a fabulous support system getting him through.

If  it's your kind of thing to do, send a little positive vibe and some prayer his way.   I'm sure he'd appreciate the help.  

He's also blogging his way through his treatment at www.mylifeline.org/cal. 

TWD - Blueberry Crumb Cake

This weeks TWD was supposed to be a crumb cake, but since Charlotte looooves blueberry muffins, that's the route I took.  Anything that gets her to eat the TWD offerings instead of me is a good thing.  And can I just say that participating in TWD has been great for improving my baking skills, it's done nothing for my ass.  Signing onto be a baker should come with a warning lable...."Baking along with us will make your once in-shape body not so in-shape anymore".  My treadmill time has doubled.  Not fun.

Anyhoo, these are delicious (according to Charlotte) and I made her promise to call me unflattering names if I even wanted to smell one.  I did and she did.  She's also promised to take the remaining ones to Auburn with her this weekend.  Good girl, that Charlotte.

Oh, and since these were for C, I omitted the nuts in the topping.

Thanks to Sihan at Befuddlement for picking this weeks recipe.  If you want the recipe, head over there.

I'm out for next week's recipe, Coconut Butter Thins.  I'll be the beached whale sunning myself in Miami along with my skinny girlfriends.  Should be a real ego boost.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

Food bloggers have the best recipes.

I stole this one from one of the best.  I made a few modifications to suit our tastes, but that's fair, right?  

It starts with one of my favorite things....flank steak.  I think flank steak is treated like the poor, ugly step-sister of the steak family, but I L.O.V.E. it.  So much flavor and so easy.  I make one every couple of weeks for Charlotte and I and it will feed us for at least two or three meals.  So when I saw this recipe for a Chili-Lime Steak Salad utilizing flank steak over at Our Best Bites, I was all over it.  Sounded like a perfect Sunday afternoon lunch for Mr. B and I.

It called for a super easy spice rub for the steak and a really tasty cilantro-lime creamy dressing for the salad.  

Like I said, I made a few modifications to the spice rub....just to kick the heat up on it a little.  We like things spicy around here.   Click on the above link for the original recipe.

Here's mine:

1 tablespoon ancho chili powder

1 tablespoon pimenton (smoked paprika)

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground corriander

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

juice of one lime

1 tablespoon olive oil

Mix this all together with a fork and rub all over the meat.  Let sit at room temperature for 15-30 minutes.  Grill according to your taste.  I like mine medium rare so it takes about 4-5 minutes per side.

Remove from the grill and let rest for 5-10 minutes and slice thinly against the grain.

Then assemble your salad. Here's the recipe from Our Best Bites:

1 recipe Creamy Lime-Cilantro Dressing
1 large head romaine lettuce
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes, sliced in half
1 red onion, sliced thin (I didn't have a red onion in the house, so I skipped this)
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed in cold water
1-2 avocados, sliced (the only avacados at Publix would not have been ripe until sometime next week, so I eliminated those this time. Will definitely put in the next time.)
cilantro for garnish
optional: fried tortilla strips

You know how to make a salad, right?? Start with a nice bed of cold, crunchy lettuce, top with tomatoes (cut in half), sliced onion, black beans, avocado and smother it in the best dressing ever. Sprinkle on some cilantro and fried tortilla strips if you're in the mood (in the mood for tortilla strips, not for, well...ya know) Oh ya, and don't forget the steak like I just did while writing this. It's kind of important. I like it warm, but you can use leftovers and have it chilled too. Yummy yummy.

Creamy Lime-Cilantro Dressing

1 pack (1oz) Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing Mix (regular or buttermilk)
ignore directions on the packet
1C mayo (I used low-fat)
1/2 C milk (or buttermilk depending on which packet you buy)
1 lime
2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
1/2 C roughly chopped cilantro
1/4 C green salsa (I used a small can of salsa-verde...that's the same thing, right?)
hot sauce

This is tough folks. Place milk, mayo, and ranch mix in a blender. Juice the lime in there too, you should get about 2T juice. Toss in the garlic, cilantro and green salsa. Blend 'er up. Sample it and add hot sauce to taste. Make it several hours ahead of time to allow it to thicken.

This was a huge hit with Mr. B.  Thanks, again, to the ladies at Our Best Bites.  

Fashion Puzzlers

I've been getting in the mood lately to do some Spring shopping so I've been perusing my favorite internet sites for ideas.  I must be getting old because there is some seriously ugly shizzle out there.

Like this....

Harem pants??  Really.  Who looks good in these?  It looks like she's carrying a load.

And this....

This just makes me laugh.  Who above the age of three needs to wear a romper?  And there's that whole bathroom dilemma.

And, OMG, this awful trend...

Gladiator sandals.  H.A.T.E. them.  Not attractive.  Not flattering.  I'm just sayin.

Needless to say....I'm still lookin.

Random Shizzle

Let's just start with my NCAA bracket and get that ugliness out of the way, shall we.  (It's not my responsibility to solve our nation's woes, so yes, I had time to fill one out!)  And can I just say that as much as I lurve my Ohio teams, it's their fault my brackets are in such as mess right now.  Ummmmm what's up with Cleveland State???  Knocking out Wake Forest???  I had Wake playing in the finals  :(  Seems embarrassing now.  Add to that Dayton eliminating West Virginia and my Buckeyes biting it in double OT and you might as well put a fork in me.

My revised Final Four is Louisville, UConn, Pitt and Oklahoma, but I've proven not to be very good at this.  Hell, it will probably be Cleveland State vs. Xavier in the finals for all I know.

The good news is, it's just a mere 24 weeks until college football.  WOOT!

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I read a couple of pretty good books while I was laying on my assets in Cabo last week.  The Associate by John Grisham and Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult.  These are two authors that I consider to be great "beach" reads....you know what you're going to get and you know it's not going to be difficult reading, plus if you're sipping a Mai Tai while reading and happen to get distracted, you'll still be able to follow the plot!  Both of these fit that description.  Especially the "knowing what you're going to get" part with the Jodi Picoult book.  I was a little disappointed.  If you've read "My Sister's Keeper", you've essentially read "Handle With Care".....she basically just changed the disease and the character's names and gave it a different title.  That being said, I still enjoyed it.  I'm not sure anyone can write about controversial topics and get you to see both sides of the issue from a sympathetic angle better than she can. 

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And finally, a couple of new obsessions.....

1.  Moroccan Oil

It's a leave in conditioner for your hair and it's A.M.A.Z.I.N.G.!!!  You massage a very small amount into your damp hair and style as usual and your hair feels like silk and shines like a mofo!  I'm not kidding.  I've started putting this stuff on my cuticles, my face....everywhere.  I'm thinking about putting it on my pasta next.  (that I am kidding about)  Get yourself some of this.

2.  Body Bugg

If you're a fan of The Biggest Loser, you've seen these on the contestants arms.  I've had mine for about a month now and it's amazingly accurate.  According to the website, here's how it works:

"The bodybugg® is the most accurate device on the market today for measuring calorie expenditure outside of a clinical setting."

"It utilizes a patented process for interpreting calorie burn called "sensor fusion" developed by BodyMedia, Inc. This process involves collecting a range of body-data using multiple physiological sensors instead of a single sensor, which is what other calorie estimation devices such as pedometers and heart rate monitors rely on. It's this multi-sensor approach that enables bodybugg® to "see" the wearer's context (whether they are sitting, sleeping, jogging, walking, etc.) that makes bodybugg® such a reliably accurate device for calorie expenditure estimation."

If you're into working out and keeping track of what you eat, this is a great device.  At the end of the day you upload your data to a website where you can also input your intake of food for the day and it will tell you exactly how many calories you've burned throughout the day vs. calories consumed.  The thing I like most about this is it calculates calories burned while at rest also, not just while you're working out.  Check it out.

TWD - French Yogurt Cake

Ohhh.....this one is gooooood.

And even better the next day when all that lemony goodness really shines.

This might be the easiest TWD assignment so far for me.  Didn't have to dirty any electrical appliances.....just a couple of bowls, a whisk and a rubber spatula.  That's my kind of clean-up.

The cake's glaze called for lemon marmalade, but all I could find was this Lemon Pear variety.  Totally fine.  I did not strain it because it had these nice candied lemon peel chunks that were yummy.

Like I said, the first piece out of the oven was fabulous, but the one I had today was even bettah!!

Make this one.  It takes 10 minutes to put together.  Even you have 10 minutes!

Thanks to Liliana of My Cookbook Addiction for choosing this.  It was nice to come home from vacation and get to make something easy.  Check out Liliana's site for the recipe.  And be sure to check the TWD blogroll to see what creative things the other bakers did with this one.....someone skipped the glaze and used a lemon cream cheese frosting!!  Brilliant.  Cream cheese frosting of any kind is da bomb.

Finally, a Cabo report!

An entire seven days without a cloud in the sky.  Well, maybe a few, but not enough to screw up my tan.  Cabo is without a doubt, the quintessential tropical location for me.  You're not allowed to swim in the Sea of Cortez because the undertow is so deadly, but that suits me perfectly.  Do not like to swim in the ocean.  Love to look at it and listen to it.  Not swimmin in it.  It's got a mushy bottom, there's that whole seaweed shizzle, and I inevitably end up swallowing salt water.  

I like my swimming to come with a concrete bottom and chlorine, thank you very much.  AKA cement pond.  Might have something to do with growing up in Ohio.  Buckeyes are not really ocean people.  All we have is Lake Erie.  Understand where I'm coming from now??

Now all my Alabama friends are ocean people.  They can't wait to get to the beach and taste the salt water.  We don't have that in common.  But we do have these in common.  And we might have consumed some of them last week.  Maybe.

But that's a whole other post.  

So, let's just start by showing you where I stayed the last time I was in Cabo.  And in the interest of full disclosure, this was a girls trip.  And the point of telling you that is to point out that Mr. B did not get to stay here.

This was the "girl's trip" pool....

This was the "girl's trip" view...

Again, just pointing out that Mr. B did not get to enjoy said house, pool or view.

If you're an Exclusive Resorts member, you might recognize said house as Residence #211.  Might just be my personal favorite......absolutely, one of them.  You would also know that it's the most difficult to get in Cabo.

Which meant we had to stay at one of the units at Esperanza.  And this time, guess who got to go?  Uh huh.  Mr. B.  Who initially thought the Esperanza was fine.  Until we went on a walk the second morning and I showed him Residence #211.  Mistake.  I heard about it the rest of the week.

The good news is that I had reserved one of the "01" units (specifically #901) which meant that we had our own pool and hot tub.  Otherwise, he would have been relentless.

Here's the living/dining room

and kitchen....

One of the guest bedrooms (three with king beds, one with two queens)...

and a very spacious outdoor area with a kitchen area.  Not bad, right?  Just not Residence #211.  My major complaint with these units are that everything but the pool itself is in the shade.  If we wanted to lay in the sun, we had to get very creative with the chair cushions.  Let's just say it was a good thing the pool edge was wide enough to accommodate the cushions.

Remember the view from #211?  This was the view from #901.  The Sea of Cortez was nowhere to be seen.  If you're looking for water views, don't book #901.

The hot tub, however, was awesome.  Nice and big.

That's Mr. B doing what he did all week.  He came home with really tanned feet!  See what I mean about the chair cushions?

If you like to hang out at the resort pool, this is the one closest to ER's units.  Charlotte loved the swim-up bar!  As you can see, it was not very crowded, which surprised me a little as it's prime spring break season.  Economy's taking a bite out of Cabo, too.

Beautiful views everywhere.  I think this was taken from one of the restaurants.  We did not leave the property for dinner and for the first time did not book an in-house chef.  The on-line reviews for them were not that promising and you had to use the hotel chefs.  For the aforementioned "girl's trip" (you remember who didn't get to go on that one, right) we had the Chef come in three nights and it was fabulous (and not outrageously priced).

Anyhoo, a couple of days into the trip, these folks arrived!  Hooty Hoo!!!

The party started.

And they wanted to go fishin.....so we did!

Got to see the famous Arch on the way out of the marina.  Quite the tourist attraction.

Carnival was there for the day...

and Captain Hook and friends...

That's Juan.  I know.  I now love fishing.

Juan did all the work.  He caught every fish and then handed over the pole so we could reel them in and take pictures and look like we knew what we were doing.  

This was his first catch.  Can I just say that I was a little in shock and how big these fish were?  I've never been deep sea fishing before.  Not even deep Lake Erie fishing.  I'm sure there's nothing this big up there.

Marty had the honors for the first one.  He knew what he was doing.  Pulled that sucker right in.

Had to take a picture of this guy.  So glad we got Juan instead of some Michigan Moron as our captain.  Suriously.

Awwww.  That's the back of Mr. B's head.  Juan caught him one too.  He might have been a rookie, but look what he "caught".

Yep, that one.

Same guy.

They brought this one up on the boat.  Very cool.

Then it was Marty's turn again.  He spent about 40 minutes wrestling with this fellow.  

He was a stubborn one.

On the way back in we were luck enough to see this.  Those are not dolphins.  That's a mama whale and her baby.    Sweeeeet.

Then Juan started dumping the bait fish and we suddenly had a LOT of friends.

And one very bold one.

But it paid off for him.  Look closely at his beak.

These guys weren't lucky enough to get any fish, but they almost got a bite of Charlotte!

This guy just kept posing.

So, we all had a great time, but guess where we'll be staying the next time??