Kale and kumquat tarts with a pancetta streusel in a toasted pumpkin seed crust

kale and kumquat tarts with a pancetta streusel in a toasted pumpkin seed crust

I love kale. I love it baked into chips, massaged into a tender salad, sauteed with garlic, and thrown into a cannellini bean soup. It's an amazingly healthy green, packed full of vitamins and minerals. But one of the things I recently learned was that combining kale (and many other greens) with citrus makes the iron in the greens more available to our bodies. So now when I make kale I try to always add some kind of citrus. Since kumquats have been showing up in our stores over the last couple weeks, they've been my new citrus of choice. If you haven't tried them, you'll be surprised by the sweetness of the skin. In fact if you don't eat the skin, the fruit will be way too sour to really enjoy eating on it's own. For this recipe, I combined a number of my favorite kale-pals. I tossed a bunch of pumpkin seeds in olive oil, smokey Hungarian paprika and cayenne pepper, toasted them in a dry pan, ground them up and added them to the crust. The filling is a combination of kale, ricotta cheese, pecorino, eggs and kumquats. And the topping is a streusel made of fried pancetta, fresh bread crumbs and pecorino cheese. Lots of steps here, I'll admit - and several that can be done ahead of time, but well worth it. Even my husband, who is beyond tired of kale for dinner these days, asked for seconds.

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ale tarts pumpkin

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