lime – Cook and Drink

Tartelette au Citron

8 May 2025

Earlier we wrote about Tarte au Citron, or Lemon Pie. This is a recipe for a Tartelette au Citron, a small but very different pie. The filling is lemon curd, which you add to the pastry case just before serving. You can easily make both components a day ahead. The crunchy, slightly sweet pastry case and the soft, rich, tart filling go together very well. You could decorate the tartelette with meringue or chocolate sprinkles, but we prefer them as they are. Great with a strong cup of coffee.

What You Need

Pâte Sucrée
- 50 grams of Unsalted Butter
- 40 grams of Caster Sugar
- 125 grams of All Purpose Flour
- 1 gram of Salt
- 1 Organic Egg
- Water (optional)
Curd
- 65 ml of Lemon Juice
- 65 grams of Unsalted Butter
- 80 grams of Fine Sugar
- One Organic Egg

What You Do (Curd)

Beat the egg
Melt the butter
Combine all ingredients.
Cook Au Bain Marie until you have the right consistency.
Or transfer to your microwave, put it on 50% or 70% power (depending on your microwave) and heat with intervals of 20-30 seconds. Mix between the intervals. This is a very precise way of heating the mixture and it gives you full control over the process. Towards the end of the process, you may want to reduce the power or shorten the intervals. The percentage and the duration of the intervals depend on your microwave and the bowl you use.
Set aside and allow to cool.
Transfer the curd to the refrigerator. It will keep for a few days.

What You Do (Pastry Case)

Combine sugar, flour and salt.
Dice butter, add to the mixture and combine. Use a hand mixer with kneading hooks.
Beat the egg and add.
Use your hands to make the dough. It should not be sticky, so it must be easy to make a ball. If too dry, add just a bit of water. If too wet, add some flour.
When done, remove from the bowl and wrap in kitchen foil. Store in the refrigerator for at least two hours. It can be stored for a few days.
Flour your work surface and roll out the pastry to a circle a larger than the top of the tartelette forms. We used 8 cm or 3 inch (quiche-) forms. The dough should be approximately 2 or 3 mm (0.1 inch) thick.
Coat the forms with butter.
Line the forms with the pastry. Press the pastry well into the sides and bottom. Use a knife to remove the excess dough.
Cover and let rest for 30 minutes in the refrigerator.
Preheat the oven to 190 °C or 375 °F.
Use a fork to prick small holes in the pastry.
Line the forms with greaseproof paper or aluminum foil, add baking beans and bake blind for 10 minutes.
Remove the paper and the baking beans.
Reduce the oven temperature to 160 °C or 320 °F.
Transfer back to the oven for 5 minutes or until golden
Transfer to a wire rack and let cool.
When the pastry cases are completely cool, add the curd and serve

PS

Two other very tasty Tartelettes: one with Blueberries and the other with Raspberries
To be published: Tartelette with Pear

RecipeTin Eats – Dinner

13 June 2024

Recently we reviewed RecipeTin Eats Cookbook: Dinner by Nagi Maehashi as part of the cookbook review project by Bernadette. It is a beautifully designed book with lots of great pictures. It is also a very positive and inviting book. In 2023 it was awarded Australian Book of the Year and it made the New York Times Best Sellers list. Nagi’s very popular website offers over three hundred recipes and videos. She has over one million followers on Instagram. Her philosophy on food and cooking is based on four principles: fast, creative, clever and fresh. And cost conscious as well!

Nagi also runs a food bank, RecipeTin Meals, where she and her team (including three full time chefs) make homemade meals which are donated to the vulnerable.

RecipeTin Eats Cookbook: Dinner contains not only over 150 recipes, but also recipes for basic sauces, stock, bread, a glossary and a table with internal cooked temperatures. All very helpful. Not so helpful are the indexes (don’t expect the obvious table of content) and the way the recipes are grouped in the book. The recipe index for instance comes with categories such as everyday food and what I do with a piece of…. Perhaps a bit too creative?

Every recipe in the book has a QR-code. Scan it and you have a helpful video guiding you through the recipe.

RecipeTin Eats Cookbook is a cookbook with lots of international dishes such as Beef Wellington, Mussels in White Wine, Sauce Bolognese and Chilli Con Carne; no recipes with kangaroo or ostrich.
We decided to make three dishes from the book, a salad with an Asian touch, a Moroccan dish with chicken and a blueberry tart with an almond filling. Our esteemed panel (André, Carolien, Hans, Joke, Martine and Rutger) was happy to join us on a sunny evening in May and talk about the three dishes. And the wine, of course!

Prawn Salad with Coconut Lime Dressing ©cadwu

We decided to make a Prawn Salad with Coconut Lime dressing because of the dressing. We expected the combination of Chinese Cabbage (or wombok in Australia), coconut, mint, cilantro and prawns to be tasty and refreshing.We served the dish with a glass of Pinot Grigio produced by Corte Vittorio.

A fresh and easy to drink wine with aromas of citrus and green apple. In general, you’re looking for a light white wine with pleasant acidity and fresh aromas. The panel was unanimous: refreshing, lots of flavours that go together very well, great colours, new flavours, love the way the apple combines with the cabbage, great on a summer evening, would like to make this myself, could I have the recipe?

One Tray Moroccan Baked Chicken with Chickpeas ©cadwu

The One Tray Moroccan Baked Chicken with Chickpeas comes with lots of flavours, baharat being one of them. A spice blend unknown to us. Fortunately, we could find it at our Turkish supermarket. Think cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg, ginger. The chicken is marinated for 24 hours in a mixture of lemon juice, oil and baharat.

It is then fried in the oven with chickpeas (coated with ginger and turmeric), fennel and tomatoes. We served the Moroccan chicken with excellent crusted bread and a glass of full-bodied Italian red wine, produced by Stefano Accordini. The wine is made from 90% Corvina Veronese and 10% Merlot grapes. It aged for four months in oak barrels, which adds to the warmth and flavours of the wine. A very affordable wine with aromas of blackberry, plum and chocolate. In general, you’re looking for a full bodied, rich red wine that goes very well with flavours like nutmeg, cumin and cinnamon.

The panel liked the presentation, the colours, the aromas and the preparation of the chickpeas in the oven. The flavours were nice, but a bit bland. It could have done with more spices. Although the chicken marinated in the refrigerator for 24 hours, the flavours of the baharat were not really present in the meat.

Blueberry Tart with Almond Filling ©cadwu

Dessert was Blueberry Tart with Almond Filling. The heading of the recipe says prep time 45 minutes, 4 hours of cooling and chilling, 1 hour cook time. Sounds doable? In reality it’s a bit more work.
The dough needs to be made, cooled, fitted in the tin, transferred to the freezer, in to the
oven, baked blind,

cooled and then filled with an almond cream that must be mixed, cooled, added to the tin, topped with blueberries, baked, topped with more blueberries and baked for another 20 to 25 minutes. Still there?
The idea of freezing the dough in the tin was great because it allowed us to do this step a few days earlier.

The panel liked the tart, the moist filling, well balanced, not too sweet, great crust and the combination of almond and blueberry was very tasty.

All three recipes required some adjustment: when we tasted the salad before serving it, we found the dressing needed extra mint and fish sauce. We also added more berries to the tart.

Should this book be on your shelf? The panel feels it’s a great, colourful, well-designed cookbook but that the number of recipes that are new or bring something specific (like the salad and the chicken we prepared) is rather limited. We would have liked to see more of Nagi, and perhaps of Australia, in the choice of recipes. One member of the panel decided to buy RecipeTin Eats Cookbook: Dinner, given the idea that if you would prepare one of Nagi’s recipes per week you would be sure to have at least one fast, tasty, colourful and creative meal per week. Very true!

RecipeTin Eats Cookbook: Dinner by Nagi Maehashi is available via your local bookstore or the well-known channels for approximately 30 euros or 30 US$. Prices may differ.

RecipeTin Eats Cookbook - Dinner by Nagi Maehahi

One Tray Moroccan Baked Chicken with Chickpeas in the oven ©cadwu

Lemon Curd

2 June 2022

A Lemon Meringue Pie, a Tarte au Citron or Scones with Lemon Curd: tasty, refreshing, bitter, sour, a bit sharp and sweet. We love it! Provided of course that the lemon is more than just juicy and sour.

This has been a bit of an issue over the past years. Similar to the German consumers who complained about the watery and flavourless Dutch tomatoes they bought around 1990, we think that most lemons lack aroma and taste. We tried limes, bought more expensive lemons, added a bit of yuzu, but in the end, we still missed the true taste and aroma of an old-fashioned lemon.

Until one day we bought a Bergamot lemon. Its aroma is intense, floral and long. The juice is sour, deeply citrusy, refreshing and bright. Exactly what we were looking for! We went home and prepared a lovely curd.

Recently we had a similar experience when we visited a dear friend. She grows a Makrut (or Thai) Lime tree, also known as Makrut Lime, in her garden mainly because she wants to use the fresh leaves in Thai and Indonesian dishes such as Tom Yum, Soto Ayam and various curries. The leaves have a complex citrus flavour with floral notes. We talked about the lovely yellow fruit and how you could use its very aromatic zest as well.
The fruit contains little juice, so when preparing a curd with Makrut limes, you need to add lime, Bergamot or lemon juice.

What You Need

65 ml of Lemon, Lime, Bergamot and/or Makrut Lime Juice
65 grams of Butter
100 grams of Sugar
One Egg
Zest

What You Do

Beat the egg, melt the butter and combine all ingredients. Make sure the sugar is dissolved. Cook Au Bain Marie until you have the right consistency. Or transfer to your microwave, put it on 50% or 70% power and heat with intervals of 20-30 seconds. Mix between the intervals. This is a very precise way of heating the mixture and it gives you full control over the process. Towards the end of the process you may want to reduce the power or shorten the intervals. The percentage and the duration of the intervals depend on your microwave and the bowl you use. We use a microwave saucepan (£1,29 only) and it works perfectly. The material doesn’t absorb warmth, so the mixture doesn’t get extra heated when you stop the microwave. Pass through a sieve (you don’t want the zest in the curd), cool in a water bassin and store in a jar.
The curd keeps for a week in the refrigerator .

PS

Around 1992 a German television program characterised the Dutch tomatoes as watery and tasteless, and called them ‘wasserbombe’. The short-term impact was enormous: the Dutch tomato went from 50% market share in Germany to something close to zero. Longer term the impact was very different: Dutch producers invested in their product, making their tomatoes tastier, richer and more diverse.