Our glut crop at the moment is mangoes. Mangoes have a good year every second year, and a great year every forth or sixth. We had mango salsa with our poached eggs for breakfast and mango icecream after dinner last night. I’ve made  mango pickle and mango chutney, a year’s supply and some to give away.  Every visitor leaves with a bag of them, and still they come. So tonight, for Brett and Johanna’s anniversary party, it has to be a mango plate.

I thought about mango cake – I have a good recipe for a mango upside down cake I should post – but my favourite dish to take to a party is always little tarts.  They make such easily transportable finger food, so easy, and they look so party-food. I’ve made mango cheesecake before, mixing the mango pulp through the cheesecake mix, but it wasn’t a keeper for me.  This one though is. Simple shortcrust pastry, lightly blind baked, then half filled with a slightly lemony cheesecake mix, topped with mango jelly.

The Recipe:

The Pastry:

In the food processor, put

• 3 cups of plain flour (I use wholemeal because that’s what I have, but for party food, I sift the bran out, so it is more like unbleached flour).
• 6 big dessertspoons of cold butter
• 1 dessertspoon sugar

Don’t overprocess it – little flakes of butter are fine.  The key to making good pastry is not overworking it.

Then add cool water, little bit by little, till the dough holds together in a ball.

Roll the pastry out on a floured benchtop till it is ½cm or so thick, then cut rounds with a small bowl.

Lightly grease muffin or tartlet tins with butter and line them with the pastry.  It will flute a little since the pastry is flat and the muffin tins cups, but that gives a nice shape to the finished tarts.

Bake the pastry cases for around 10 minutes till they are firm but not yet colouring.

The Cheesecake Filling

Blend together

• 1 tub (250 grams) cream cheese
• The same tub three-quarters full (around 200 grams) of plain yoghurt
• 3 eggs
• 3 dessertspoons sugar
• a teaspoon lemon rind
• juice of half a small lemon
• a little vanilla essence 

Pour the cheesecake mix into the pastry cases. It should two-thirds fill them all. Bake for another fifteen minutes or so till they are set and the pastry is lightly golden.

Cool before pouring in the mango jelly.

Mango Jelly

You need enough gelatine to set 1 litre of water, so that is two sachets, or 6 teaspoons of powdered gelatine or 12 sheets of leaf gelatine.  Follow the instructions on your gelatine.

The mango pulp though doesn’t set as readily as water, so you need 500 ml of mango pulp.

Dissolve the gelatine in 250 ml of boiling water, then mix the gelatine water into the mango pulp to give you 750 ml altogether.

Pour over the cooled cheesecakes to fill the tart cases.

If you can find enough room in the fridge, they set quicker, especially given mango season is summer! In my fridge they take about an hour and a half to set.

For about 9 months of the year we have silver beet, (or Swiss chard if you are in US).  There’s a few months from midsummer to midautumn when the grasshoppers feast on any left in the garden, but there aren’t many left because most spring plantings just bolt to seed.  Egyptian spinach – Mulaheyah – fills the gap.  But proper English spinach, now that’s another thing.

Spinach is up there with kale, one of those superfoods with enough vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients to make vitamin pills look silly. In particular, cooked spinach is a stunning source of Vitamin K, useful for preventing osteoporosis among other things.  Silver beet substitutes for spinach in most recipes, but real spinach, soil grown in season, is a treat. I’m at the edge of the climate range for real English spinach, but for a month or so each year in late winter we feast on it.

Silver beet is a bit tougher and does better for longer cooking.  Spinach though just needs to be blanched.  Under a poached egg, with lemony garlicky mushrooms, in Greens as Themselves.  Or in these little spinach and cheese rolls that are not baked but shallow fried so they come together fast.

The Recipe:

This makes just a dozen little canape sized rolls. I like making recipes in small quantities myself – it saves leftovers and often there’s a quantum leap in how fast and easy it is to make a little batch to a big batch.  And for you, a small batch gives you a chance to decide if you like it or if you want to tweak the recipe for your own taste before you commit too many ingredients.  But, having said all that, the recipe can easily be doubled or trebled, and I would think they would freeze well before frying –  just like ravioli, in layers separated with greaseproof paper.  Which would allow you to just take a few out to fry for lunch boxes whenever. I am looking forward to trying them out on nearly 3-year-old Teo but I imagine they might be very kids lunch box acceptable.  They are very adult lunch box acceptable.

To make the wrappers:

Blend an egg with ½ cup of plain flour (wholemeal or unbleached) and a pinch of salt to make a kneadable dough.  If it is too dry, add a teaspoon or two of oil.  This is a basic pasta or won-ton recipe, so I would think you could use bought wrappers if you like, but making your own is so very easy and you get to use real egg.

Let it rest for a minute while you make the filling, then roll the dough out with a rolling pin on a well floured benchtop, or with a pasta machine, to make a long strip, about 10 cm (4 inches) wide.  Make the ends as square as you can so you don’t have to trim too much off to square them up.

Meanwhile, make the filling:

Blanch a bunch of spinach in boiling water for just a minute or two to wilt it, then drain and squeeze it to remove all the liquid.  It will reduce to about ¼ cup.

Put it in the food processor (you don’t need to wash it after the pastry blending) with

• 1 ball of bocconcini (or you could substitute 35 gm or so of mozzarella or any really melty cheese)
• 1 slice parmesan or any tasty cheese

Pulse the spinach in the food processor with the cheeses very briefly, just to chop it all together without blending it. Taste the filling and add salt to taste.   I like adding half a teaspoon of grated lemon rind too.  Or, for adults, a little touch of wasabi. Taste and see what you think.

To assemble and cook:

Mix a dessertspoon of plain flour with a little water to make a paste.  Use a pastry brush, or just your fingers, to spread it thinly over the pastry.  Leave a smidgen for later.

Lay the spinach mixture down the middle, then roll it into a log.

Paint the top side with the leftover flour and water paste and sprinkle with sesame seeds.

Cut into 75 cm (3 inch) lengths, then let them sit to dry on a floured benchtop for 10 minutes or so.

Heat 10 cm (½ inch) or so of oil in a heavy bottomed fry pan.  (I use light olive oil for frying like this because it has a high enough smoke point and it’s monounsaturated). Fry the rolls until they are golden, turning with tongs.

They are wonderful warm but also ideal for lunch boxes or made-ahead hors d’oeuvres with a spicy dipping sauce.

The low-light photo doesn’t do it justice.  Usually I don’t post something the first time I make it, but this will be the last time for the season too. I had to pick the last of the season’s red eggplants – the chooks are now in the bed they were in, getting it ready for all the winter leafies – cauliflowers and celeriac and silver beet and cabbage –  to be planted out.  Enough pickles on the shelf, and no tahini in the pantry for baba ganoush, and a batch of chick peas cooked for felafel.

So I tried something different.  And now there are no more eggplants till next year to do it again, and I want to remember this for myself if no-one else.  So you will have to make do with the photo!

The Recipe:

The quantities are a little vague – I didn’t think I was making a recipe to post so I didn’t measure.  But it’s the kind of recipe that you make to taste anyhow.

• I started with about 3 cups of peeled and diced red eggplant. It would probably work just as well with black eggplant.
• Massage through a handful of salt, and let sit for an hour or so, then rinse and squeeze the eggplant.
• You end up with about 2 cups of washed and squeezed eggplant.
• Fry or bake in a bit of olive oil, until the eggplant is very soft.  I fried this lot and it took about 15 minutes on a medium heat, stirring occasionally.
• As it cooked, I added in a chili chopped fine, a couple of cloves of crushed garlic,  and a thumb of turmeric grated.
• Scrape it all into a bowl and with a fork, mash and whip together with one small red onion, finely diced, juice of a lime (about 80 ml, or ¼ cup) and three big dessertspoons of plain Greek yoghurt.  The lime is the key.  You could probably substitute lemon but the lime juice gives it a really interesting distinctive flavour.  And limes are in season, and I have enough lime pickles on the shelf too!
• Put in the fridge and allow to mature for a couple of hours if possible.

We ate it with felafel and tabouli and an impromptu dinner guest, and it has knocked baba ganoush off its spot as my favourite eggplant sauce or dip.

Basic shortcrust pastry is so so so easy, I don’t get it why people buy frozen?  Puff pastry, ok, that’s  a bit tricky (but still worth making your own).  Phyllo, yep, right, I buy that most of the time.  But shortcrust – nah,  it takes less to make your own than it does to peel off that blue plastic, and you get to use real butter and no nasty transfats.

The recipe quantities and temperatures and times are a bit vague, because it really doesn’t matter too much.  The more butter (and the less water) in your pastry, the more melt-in-the-mouth it is, but also the harder to handle (and the more calories).  If you use lots of butter, you need to get it quite cool, or the butter melts as you are trying to roll it out and it gets sticky.  But it’s very delicious and you can make the pastry quite thick and the star of the dish.  If you are in a hurry, or the pastry is not the star of the dish, you can go light on the butter and roll it out thin for a more cracker-like pastry that is easy to handle.

That’s it really.  All the rest is elaboration on the theme.

You can use cream or sour cream or oil in place of butter, but it works like melted butter and the pastry is harder to handle and might need to be rolled between sheets of greaseproof paper.  If you have an egg white elsewhere in a recipe, you can substitute an egg yolk for part of the butter and it makes it slightly less “short” but still delicious and easier to handle than all butter.  Any saturated fat (that sets solid at room temperature) can be substituted for the butter and you are just thinking about the taste rather than the texture. If you are using a low fat pastry and a low fat filling, a bit of “blind baking” first stops the filling soaking into the pastry and making it soggy.  Blind baking just means covering your pastry with greaseproof paper and filling with uncooked beans, or rice, or chickpeas or something similar, and cooking for 10 minutes or so before filling.  The beans are dry already so it doesn’t hurt them.  If the pastry, or the filling, has a lot of butter, oil, cheese or eggs it, the pastry won’t go soggy and there’s usually no need.

The flour needs to be flour – it is the little grains of starch in it exploding that makes pastry. It can be wholemeal or unbleached, but other flours like besan behave differently.  You can make pastry from them but it is a different story.  Self-raising flour is a different story too.

The recipe makes 12 tartlets. They are perfect for lunch boxes, or party finger food – which is where these went. These are really quick and simple, and they were a party hit.

The Pastry:

You can do this in a food processor, or just cut the butter into tiny cubes and rub it into the flour with your fingertips, till it resembles breadcrumbs. (My nanna used to say that the best pastry makers have cool hands, because the object of the exercise is to have tiny flecks of un-melted butter mixed through the flour.)

• 1 cup of wholemeal plain flour (wholemeal or unbleached)
• 2 heaped dessertspoons of cold butter
• pinch salt

Add just enough cold water to make a soft dough.  Add it  carefully, spoonful at a time.  Put your dough in the fridge to cool down while you start the pumpkin off.

The Filling:

Peel, dice, and roast a cup and a half of pumpkin and one larg-ish red onion.  Dice the pumpkin into 1 to 1.5 cm dice.  You can sprinkle with a bit of fresh thyme if you have some.  It will cook really quickly – you’ll just have time to roll out the  pastry.

Blend together:

• 2 eggs
• a big dessertspoon of plain yoghurt (or cream, or sour cream)
• 100 grams Danish or Greek feta (the smooth kind, preferably)
• A little grating of parmesan

I use my food processor for the pastry, then without needing to wash it, for the filling.  But you could also just beat them together with an egg beater.

Assembling and baking:

Grease 12 muffin tins or tart cases.

On a floured benchtop, roll the dough out, cut out 12 circles and line the tart cases.  My regular sized muffin tray is perfect for this, and the lid from one of my large storage jars is perfect for cutting the pastry out.

Spoon the pumpkin and onion evenly into the tart cases. Spoon the egg and feta mix evenly over them.

Bake in a medium-hot oven for around 20 to 30 minutes, till the tart cases are crisp and colouring and the egg mix is set.

They are best is you let them cool before eating. No Teo, they aren’t cool yet.