Easy Sunday Supper

Sometimes, Sundays are about slow roasting meats and veggies and hanging around the house, enjoying the aroma.

And sometimes Sundays are about running half-marathons and going to baby showers and playing with the neighbor kids until the sun goes down.

This kind of Sunday is fun, too, but it doesn't leave much room for a big, beautiful dinner. Enter tarts:

I've sung their praises before, because they work in the summer and they work in the fall, they work with veggies and they work with fruit. They are like fast food for gardeners, and tonight they helped us use up a lot of extra Swiss chard that we had to cut to make room for our greenhouse tunnels earlier this week. (They also helped us not blow our entertainment money on junk food when we didn't much feel like cooking.)

For our quick dinner, Kirk made two tarts: The Red and Blue beet tart we've had before, but the Swiss chard and feta one is new. To make it, he steamed about a dozen chard leaves until they were wilted, then chopped them fine, along with a couple cloves of raw garlic. Then he folded in some crumbled feta and seasoned the mixture with a pinch of salt and a couple dashes of black pepper. This all gets spread on a base of puff pastry and baked according to the directions on the package (because an easy dinner does not involve making puff pastry from scratch).

All of the strong flavors in these tarts (chard, beets, and the pungent cheeses) are well-complemented by some sweet honeyed peaches from our winter stores. Sometimes a fruit side dish is so much better than a veggie one, and I love peaches with just about anything.

Easy cooking, easy clean-up, easy evening.