How to Make Potato Tart

A tart is a pastry dish with opening so that you can bake it filled with sweet or savoury ingredients like:

-fruit
-custard
-chocolate
-cheese
-mushrooms,
-curry
-pastry cream, also known as, crème pâtissière

Shortcrust is a type of pastry often used for the base of a tart, quiche, pie, or flan.  To make a basic shortcrust pastry you require:

-plain flour
-butter
-milk
-a pinch of salt

Sugar can be added for sweet shortcrust pastry.  Some recipes use an egg yolk to to create a richer, more tender, and flavourful crust with a golden hue.  A thin layer of egg yolk can also be brushed on the blind-baked shell to seal it and prevent the filling from leaking.

You can watch this video to learn how to make it.

You can learn more about tart from Hali, a French-trained baker, at the following link:

A guide to tart crust

Do you know that you can make your "tart" with mashed potatoes?  You can learn how to make it and cook the fillings from this video:

I prefer the simpler version as shown in the following video:

Crispy Potato Tart recipe

I will use pork instead of chicken to cook it.  These are the ingredients required:

I will consider using my sardine with onion dish as fillings:

 Or my peppers, onion and carrot dish:

I wonder if it will taste good with scrambled eggs and tomatoes added as fillings.

Should I can mash the potato from my curry dish to make the tart and tear apart the chicken to add as filling?

I can also use this filling for making chicken curry puff.

Pickled Vegetables

Have you tried the acar served with Nasi Lemak at Madam Kwan's.  I like it so much that I have an urge to make my own.

I found this video instruction from The Meatmen Channel.

These are the ingredients required to make it:

2 cucumbers
2 carrots
1/2 chinese cabbage
1/2 cauliflower
5 Long Beans
4 chillies
1L water
650ml white vinegar
10 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp salt
120g shallots
4 cloves garlic
15g tumeric
4 candlenuts
1 stalk lemongrass
100g fresh chillies
50g soaked dried chillies
20g belacan
4 tbsp oil
250g ground peaunts
50g fried shallots
40g toasted white sesame seeds

After checking out the amount of ingredients I will have to prepare to make it, I have decided to go for the simpler Japanese version.  I found the recipes at Japanese Cooking Channel. 

These are recipes I picked out from the video that do not require mirin to make since I do not stock it in my pantry:

The good news is that I can replace mirin with rice vinegar on a 1:1 ratio as substitute.  According to All Recipes, since mirin is much sweeter than rice vinegar, I will have to add about a 1/2 teaspoon of sugar per tablespoon of rice vinegar. 

Here is another recipe I found on Daily Cooking Quest that I would like to try making:

I am glad to read from a comment posted by Anita, the cook, that though kombu will give the pickle a bit of umami, it will still be delicious without it. 

Healthy Snack Spinach Balls

You can hide vegetables in a dish if you finely chop them to combine and deep fry.  Try cooking this with all ingredients in the recipe for finicky eaters.  If they refuse to eat, remove one or two vegetables and give it another go.

How To Stir Fry Vegetable

When you use vegetables with thick stems like broccoli and cauliflower, it is suggested that you blanched them first before cooking but you can also stir fry them first before adding leafy greens. I like this post on Quora by Chef Mark Blaxall on how you can prepare and cut broccoli or cauliflower into florets for your dish.  

Here are steps on how to stir fry vegetables.



Here is how you can stir-fry vegetable with shrimps and yellow bean sauce.



Type of root vegetables that need to be stir fried first in before adding leafy greens.



You can read more useful tips on stir frying vegetables at Taste of Asian Food or watch some videos on “Vegetable Preparation” by Chef Robert Nassar from Dinner Done.