This cookbook celebrates the time-honored tradition of cooking with homemade pastry with a collection of recipes, stories, tips and techniques designed to give avid or aspiring cooks the tools needed to make winning pastry dishes. With an abundance of convenience foods on the market, pastry making in the home kitchen is a dying art that demands to be preserved. Homemade pastry tastes and looks better than store-bought processed alternatives and it’s healthier. It is not as hard to make as it’s made out to be, and it’s inexpensive and convenient. The rekindled recipes in this book revive old skills passed down through generations that are renewed with new twists on both pastry and filling ingredients. This is the second in a series of books focused on cooking with homemade ingredients and fresh herbs and produce. It follows Rekindled Recipes: Cooking with Homemade Stock.
In this cookbook there are recipes that will charm guests at a cocktail party, those that are ideal as appetizers or a light brunch or lunch, and a set of pastry inspired main courses. The line-up of recipes is eclectic, reflecting many different cultural roots and cooking styles. Asian influences are notable in a number of the dishes including Vibrant Vegetable Gyozas, Cute Curry Puffs, Thai Chicken Sausage Rolls, Vegetable Samosas and Enticing Empanadas. More traditional savory pastry include Saturday Lunch Meat Pies and Creamy Chicken Pot Pies, Dianne’s Sausage Rolls, Nan’s Egg and Bacon Pie, Old Style Pasties and Sally’s Wholemeal Curry Pasties. There is a set of very dainty and sumptuous dishes - Sweet Onion and Goat Cheese Tartlets, Pretty Tomato and Cheese Flans, Cheese and Bacon Twists and Spinach Pinwheels.
Wider influences from Europe, particularly France, set the tone for another set of pastry recipes. We have Luscious Quiche Lorraine, Baked Brie with Sundried Tomatoes and Pine Nuts, Chicken and Asparagus Puff Tarts, Roasted Beet and Goat’s Cheese Puffs, Cheese Gougères, Tempting Spinach Galette and Doug’s Potato Pierogies. The Creamy Fish Pie recipe delivers another delicate dish, while the Roasted Vegetable Strudel has Mediterranean.