Chestnut and shallot tarte tatin

Here comes a dish that can be a serious contender to a nut roast when celebrating a vegetarian Christmas or any other winter fest. There are small shallots and chestnuts balsamic glazed on a tarte tatin accompanied by some dried cranberries, which make such a wonderful seasonal dish together.

I found the recipe in this article: Our 10 best roast dinner centrepiece recipes and it's The not nut roast: Chestnut and shallot tarte tatin by Rosie Reynolds. Once I made the tarte tatin, I absolutely loved it!

The only devious task in this recipe is prepping 500 g of small shallots, which can take a while. Otherwise this is quite an easy recipe for a tarte tatin, as long as the turning over bit goes well.

I'm not going to repeat the recipe here, as the perfect instructions are already in that Guardian article. I would really warmly recommend you to try this dish, it's something different for a change. What do you think of this recipe?

Your VegHog

Cheese and shallot Spätzle bake

I have already shared one of my Spätzle recipes here, and here comes another one. To the first recipe I added some bell peppers, but today I'm just making my basic shallot Spätzle bake. Maybe I'll have to explain again what Spätzle is to those who aren't familiar with it. Spätzle is a German dish, Swabian egg noodles or small dumplings, mostly eaten as a side. I however feel that Spätzle can make wonderful stand-alone dishes and therefore use it as the main star of these recipes. It's great weekend food as well.

Spätzle dough:

400g wheat flour

4 eggs

1tsp salt

250ml water

Bake ingredients:

4 shallots

4 garlic cloves

1tbsp olive oil

150g emmental cheese

First caramelise the shallots in olive oil, and also fry the garlic.

Make the Spätzle dough by whisking the dough ingredients into an even batter. It should be fairly moist, yet elastic. Bring a large saucepan of water to the boil and press the Spätzle dough through the largest setting of a potato ricer straight into the heavily boiling water. Do this in small batches, but make sure that the water is always boiling, otherwise it could lead into dissolving of the dough structure into the water. After a couple of minutes the Spätzle start floating on the surface, and then they can be taken out.

Add the cooked Spätzle to the shallot and garlic pan and mix. Put the mixture into an oven dish, you can make one large dish or several smaller ones. Grate the cheese and place it on the top of the bakes.

Bake at 200C for about 20 minutes until the cheese topping is golden brown.

Enjoy with a lovely Riesling and a fresh side salad!

Your VegHog