The most effective  inspiration is the deadline they say. We had some broccoli that was starting to look not as fabulously green. It was making me nervous, yet inspired! This is how our green tart with vegan blue cheese was born.

I always wanted to make a tart, open salty pie or quiche lorraine as some call it! I was afraid of making the crust. You see those amazing wavy golden crusts and you get intimidated to a point! However, we owe it to ourselves to face our fears, don’t we?

We certainly owe ourselves a perfect tart so here you go:

Ingredients:

For the crust (which is very easy by the way)

• 320 grams of all purpose self-raising gluten-free flour ( 2 1/3 cups)
• 225 grams of vegan butter cold, straight from the fridge (7 Tablespoons)
• a pinch of sea salt
• a teaspoon of sugar
• 12 Tablespoons of cold water(using the traditional tablespoons we use to eat to measure it)

In a bowl, mix the flour, sea salt, sugar and butter. Work with your hands until the butter and the flour are mixed. It is crumbly, I know, but now you will pour spoon by spoon the cold water and you will keep working with your hands and fists, lovingly handling the dough until it becomes consistent. We always put parchment paper between the pan and the food because we are trying desperately to reduce the amount of washing we have to do (we do not have a dishwasher of course). So move the dough in a tart pan (ours is 26 centimeters and this amount of crust was ideal) and patiently spread it to cover the whole pan. With a fork poke the crust so that it can bake nice and evenly; the heat can distribute throughout the crust this way. Put it in the oven at 160° Celsius (320° F) for 10 to 15 minutes to pre-bake it. The crust is about done when it blushes a bit and gets a hint of color. Take it out of the oven, set it aside, good job!!

For the contents of this pie you will need:

• 1 leak
• 5 green onions ( the ones we bought were small , i don’t know how yours are!)
• 1 green pepper
• 2 cups chopped white mushrooms
• 3 broccoli (which were also rather small, we shop for organic produce so they are tiny and cute)
• a pinch of cumin
• olive oil

Chop the leak, green onions, pepper, and 2 cups of mushrooms. I boiled the broccoli in very hot boiling salty water for about 5 minutes. Then, I removed it from the water and chopped the flowery part off them and discarded the stems. You can mash the juicy green part in a Vitamix or blender to put it in the stuffing if you would like 🙂

Coat a frying pan with olive oil and heat it up over medium heat on the stove. Place the fine chopped green onions and the leak in the frying pan. Soften them up by sizzling them and then throw in the mushrooms with the peppers and a pinch of cumin (which makes the mushrooms taste amazing). When everything is mostly soft, remove from the heat, add the broccoli and broccoli mash then mix it well together. Add 8 tablespoons of the amazing blue cheese Jake made and make sure the stuffing is juicy!

Spread this mixture on top of the crust, insert in oven, bake for 10 to 15 minutes at 160° Celsius (320° F) until the crust turns a golden brown color!

Take out of the oven, sprinkle vegan Parmesan cheese generously on top and enjoy with no regrets because broccoli is super healthy!

NOTE: if you are too busy or simply too bored to make the blue cheese, you can use  cream from almonds or rice, but you will need something creamy 🙂