The perfect lunch for when it’s too hot to cook, and you’re sick of salad.
I don’t function well in the heat. Anything above 25ºC and I struggle, needing shade or cold water the same way others might crave a burning fireplace in the winter. This is especially problematic as my flat gets hot when the sun is shining (even if this does mercifully happen less frequently in the UK than in some other places).
When working from home, sitting with a fan blowing strongly into my face helps stop the beads of sweat start forming and keeps me from melting down (I’ve recently acquired a tower fan; it’s not an exaggeration to say it has changed my life). But I’ve always had a problem when it comes to lunch time, when it is necessary to approach the kitchen. It’s enough of an ordeal to leave the refreshing breeze of the fan, let alone igniting the hob or switching the oven on – but I’m also not keen on eating endless sandwiches and salads until the seasons change.
Enter the BBC GoodFood pea and leek tart, my go-to staple of pre-prepared lunches to last me through a heatwave.
Ovens are for evenings
Before I started making bread this year, I’d never been much of a baker. I also don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so even though I don’t actively avoid pastry-based dishes for any dietary reason, they’ve never been a huge part of my life. This meant cooking any form of savoury tart was new to me – but a quick trip to the shops to get a tart tin and some baking beads and I was good to go.
The pea and leek tart is very easy to make and only takes about an hour in total (including all chopping, mixing and baking). The steps are well explained on the GoodFood website, but I do have 4 recommendations for what I believe are small improvements (aside from number 2, which aims to correct an inexplicable requirement in the ‘official’ ingredients):
- Add a more generous amount of butter when frying the leeks (about a tablespoon rather than half a teaspoon) and don’t add any water. The extra butter gives them a much richer and saltier flavour, and I feel the water really dilutes them down. Be careful not to burn the leeks and butter though.
- Use fresh spinach rather than defrosting pre-frozen spinach (I have never been able to understand why the recipe suggests this in the first place – it’s bonkers).
- Add much more than 4 mozzarella pearls on top. Life is too short: buy a couple of full sized mozzarella balls and cut them into slices.
- Grind a generous amount of black pepper on top of the tart before baking.
Being able to make the whole tart in just one hour (before leaving to cool) means I can easily make one in the evening when the sun’s rays are no longer super-heating my kitchen. The whole thing can be prepared and cooled when my flat is a passable temperature, and then be left in the fridge overnight covered by some tin foil ready for lunch the next day.
I have also discovered that cold temperatures actually improve the tart. A night in the fridge helps the mixture of cream, butter and green vegetables set properly, making it easier to cut slices from. This is great because when you get a full mouthful of all the ingredients together the result is delicious. Texturally each piece is sandwiched between crunchy pastry and chewy, slightly firm baked mozzarella. When you bite through these layers, the crisp sweetness of the peas is complemented by the buttery leeks, with the spinach weaving everything together and the richness of the cream reinforcing every flavour.
The tart is rich enough that a generous slice is all I need for lunch on a hot day. For a bit more variety I usually complement it with a pickle or two that I have in the fridge, and it also goes very nicely with grainy mustard and almost any variety of hot sauce.
In the fridge it also lasts around 5 days (as the recipe is quite dairy-heavy I don’t like to leave one any longer). This means not only that you can approach making one of these tarts as a sort of “hot weather lunch batch cooking” exercise, but also that you have more than enough to offer a slice to friends or family, or to have a small slice as a savoury snack every now and then when you fancy it.
Once you have one of these tarts concealed under tin foil in your fridge, not only do you have easy access to a lunch that (at least in my opinion) is much nicer than a simple sandwich or salad, but also one that is really quick to serve. It takes only a few seconds to cut a slice, meaning I can swiftly retreat back to the cooling breeze of the fan and take shelter from the midday sun.
