Oliveaceous

After yet another sunny but freezing Sunday morning walk in April I set my mind on the recipe I was to make during the afternoon. With Kate Bush's difficult second album on the stereo I greased a twenty-five centimetre wide flan tin that was around two centimetres deep. As well as using margarine to grease the tin I sprinkled some flour into it so as to be totally sure the completed product wouldn't stick to the tin. 

I first needed to make a pastry case for what was going to become an olive and onion tart. I poured out eight ounces of wholemeal flour, I should point out the you must use wholemeal flour for this recipe as I once used wholemeal bread flour and struggled to get the resulting pastry to stick together. I then put four ounces of margarine that I had cut into cubes into the bowl and rubbed the ingredients together until they resembled breadcrumbs. Now came a slightly tricky bit. I put into the mixture two table spoons of milk and mixed them into the rest of the ingredients. It's a thin line that you tread between putting too much milk in so the pastry becomes sloppy and too sticky to roll out and putting too little in and finding the pastry is too dry and disintegrates when rolled out. The trick is to add the milk and stir it in gradually but if it becomes too damp add some flour to compensate until the pastry is of the right consistency to roll out. Once the pastry was of the right consistency I rolled it out and lined the tin with it. I then put the tin to one side. 

The next step was to make the filling; I cut up three red onions and fried them with twelve de-stoned black olives and two tablespoons of nutmeg.  I fried them for about ten minutes until you could start to see the veins in the onions, however I took care to make sure the ingredients were not burned bearing in mind they would soon be baked in the oven. I then cracked an egg in a separate bowl, beat it and then added it to the onions together with a touch under a quarter of a pint of milk. Next I poured the mixture into the pastry case, spaced the olives evenly around the outside of the case and put three in the middle.

I pre-heated the oven to 165 degrees (175 if you've not got a fanned oven) and cooked the flan on baking tray (so as to stop it leaking into the oven) for thirty minutes. Sometimes depending on the type of oven you have you may need to cook it for thirty five or forty minutes. 

The key to the quality taste of this dish was the nutmeg which mixed well with the crisp onions and the black olives. Also the pastry although quite difficult to make was certainly worth the effort and had much more texture and flavour than normal shortcrust pastry made with plain flour.

The finished dish- I took it out of the oven at just the right time to stop the onions being too burnt.