09.26.11_Veggie Tart

I came across a picture of a flaky crust covered in roasted vegetables and I thought, "that looks incredible." After reading the recipe and realizing that the roasted vegetables were sitting on top of hummus, it only made me more excited for this dish. The website that had the recipe was unfortunately not in English so I had to improvise a little bit. Thanks to Google Translate most of the work was done for me but apparently not all the words were translatable.  I'm still not sure exactly what was written where it said, "Since humus = BUUUN and vegetables browned in the oven = BUUUUN and tart = BUUN and USOOOR, it is obvious that this tart should be a dream. Non?" Perhaps BUUUUN equals GOOOOD?

Anyway, I got the gist of the recipe and I decided to use store bought hummus instead of making my own like the recipe suggested. On the way to the store I realized that most puff pastry or phyllo dough comes frozen and I had not planned far enough in advance to have time to defrost the dough. We decided that we would use the Pillsbury Crescent Roll dough as a substitute and it would be just as buttery and flaky and delicious.  In the end it was, but getting there was much more difficult than I anticipated.

I really hoped to just pop open the can of dough, put it on a cookie sheet and call it a day. Unfortunately the can of crescent rolls we bought had torn dough inside. I was afraid that the dough wouldn't all cook together into one sheet so I figured I could just ball up the dough, and re-roll it out. This did not work. The dough just sprung back to the original shape and was proving to be quite difficult. After an aggravating 10 minutes or so,  I finally was able to just mash it out with my hands until it was a reasonable size and shape. I put the dough into the oven to bake until it was golden brown.

While the dough was cooking I also roasted the vegetables. We used squash, zucchini, eggplant, and I put tomato and a shallot on my half. I just tossed the veggies with EVOO and S&P before putting them in the oven.  After both the dough and the veggies were ready, I took them out of the oven and spread some hummus (we used Cava Mezze Spicy Hummus from Whole Foods) onto the dough. Phillip and I then topped our own halves. After the mishap with the dough it still turned out super tasty. It was like a make-shift pizza with hummus instead of marinara sauce. And who doesn't love roasted vegetables?! This would be a super easy dish to whip together last minute with whatever vegetables you have lying around that you need to use up before they go bad.