Mushroom-Swiss Tart

This was very good as impromptu dinners go. On Friday I really, really felt like cooking, but we had a strange assortment of things in the fridge -- no meat, lots of mushrooms -- and I was sick of frittatas and pasta dishes. Enter the mushroom tart.

The filling consisted of:

• an onion and a container of mushrooms, sauteed in olive oil and simmered with a little sherry
• three eggs
• parsley
• Amish Swiss cheese, cubed
• salt and pepper
  

For the crust, I used the recipe mentioned in this post. Here it is with my slight changes:

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Super-Serious Crust

• 7 T unsalted butter, cold
  
• a pinch of salt, or more, depending on whether the recipe is savory or sweet
• 1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (I used White Lily. This is a very good use for Southern flours.)
• 2 egg yolks
• 3-4 tbs cold water

Mix the flour and salt. Cut in the butter quickly with a fork and/or fingers. Add yolks and water and mix briefly to form a dough. Roll into a ball and chill for at least 1/2 hour. Roll out quickly on a floured board with a floured rolling pin. Fold into quarters to lift into tart pan, then unfold and shape as desired.

In this case there was a lot of dough, so I folded it way over to make a messy top crust for the tart.

***

One of the reasons the crust was so good was that I used butter from Happy Cow Creamery in Pelzer, SC. I've always wanted to buy their butter, but it comes in huge 2-pounds blocks with no measurement markings on the wrapper. Since Annie Postic told me I could freeze it, and since I got a kitchen scale for my birthday, I can now weigh the butter to measure it and keep it in the freezer so it won't go bad.



And such butter it is. It's got so much flavor -- on bread you need only the thinnest smear. I love it.

We had thin slices of the tart with a salad topped with a sort of diced red pepper vinaigrette/relish.