Recipe: Grant’s Blue Cheese and Pear Tarts

Every year at the place where I work, our department organizes a “Food Day” near Christmas. It’s basically a potluck. This is what I brought:

Grant’s Blue Cheese and Pear Tarts

(everything estimated because I kind of winged this one, and snacked extensively throughout)

Ingredients:

-    like, a pound of blue cheese
-    about a litre of canned pears (you could also chop up fresh pears, or use a tart fruit like Granny Smith apples, maybe)
-    table cream. A slosh or a slosh-and-a-half
-    chopped walnuts, if you want. Maybe a handful? If you have a big hand.
-    pepper, to taste
-    liquid honey (optional, but nice)
-    tart shells (phyllo dough tart shells would be best, but if you happen to be in Superstore at midnight the night before you need these things, and they don’t have any phyllo dough except in those big rolls that take five hours to defrost, and you totally don’t want to mess around with that nonsense, then go ahead and grab some regular tart shells. You’ll be fine, you big ninny.)

DIRECTIONS:

1.    Dump that blue cheese into a big bowl and crumble it up. You can buy pre-crumbled blue cheese, but it’s way more expensive than the regular stuff, so you shouldn’t. Don’t worry overmuch about the crumbling, because it’ll get easier when you add the cream, but get it nice and broken up to start with.

2.    Chop the pears into the blue cheese. Use more or less pear depending on how much you like the strong flavour of blue cheese. Actually, you could vary this recipe a lot, with a milder Gorgonzola, or some tart apples. Make the pear pieces kind of small, though. If you’re using canned pears, reserve the syrup; you can add it later to adjust the sweetness.

3.    Add maybe a half-cup of cream. Or a little more. Or a little less. Depending on how chunky/liquidy you want this. You really can’t go wrong, although you could add a little at a time so you can judge what it’s like. You could probably even skip this. Keep mixing everything up.

4.    Add some chopped walnuts. If you went overboard with the cream, a bunch of walnuts will help hold the mixture together.

5.    Grind some pepper into it, to taste. Believe it or not, pepper tastes really good in this. And, if you happen to be moving, and you’ve packed up the pepper in some box and can’t find it, but for some reason you can find that big thing of whole peppercorns that you bought to refill the pepper mill, you can crush peppercorns with the back of a spoon on a plate, by pressing down carefully with your thumb, and this feels really artisinal and Martha Stewart-y, and is extremely aromatic, but is also really freaking time-consuming, and you’ve got to be careful because those round little bastards will shoot everywhere.

6.    Spoon the mixture into the tart shells, then pop ’em in the oven for about 15 minutes at 350 F. Serve warm, with some liquid honey drizzled on top, and if you have any larger walnut pieces, that’d be some nice presentation, right there.

(Makes, uhhh, maybe 50? Depending on how generous you are with filling the tart shells, and how diligent a snacker you are during the process. You can also make the mixture up a few hours ahead of time, and even spoon it into the tart shells, if you keep it covered and refrigerated. I wouldn’t go crazy with leaving it there, though, because there is cream in it, but for a few hours, you’ll be fine.)

Enjoy!