Garden Bounty Dinner

Finally, our garden is giving us tomatoes. They really seemed to take a long, long time to ripen this year. Of course, they are all ripening at once instead of the succession time we had hope for so I am scrambling to try to think of recipes to use them up. I hope Jeff is in the mood for tomatoes like every day. 
We have some Early Girl red, Heirloom Cherokee purple and some yellow cherry tomatoes so I thought we would have a tomato tart and a salad for dinner, no shortage of veggies there!

I usually just make a pie crust from scratch because it’s so easy (this recipe makes 2 so you can freeze the other one for later) and you can find a delicious recipe here or you can certainly just buy pie dough that you “roll out” so you can fit it in the tart shell vs the pre-shaped pie crust.
I used Martha Stewart’s recipe for a tomato tart. Since I had 3 different varieties, I used all 3.
Look at these sliced up…YUM!

Fresh basil from the garden to sprinkle on top…

And here is the finished tart! It was delicious…..

To go with it, I made a “what do I have in the fridge” salad…
I had just bought boston lettuce (the couple plants I had in the garden are toast from the heat we had this summer), I had some leftover cannellini beans, red onion, cucumbers, yellow cherry tomatoes and capers with just a simple red wine vinagrette (red wine vinegar, extra virgin olive oil and salt and pepper to taste). You can start with a 1/4 cup vinegar, 1/3 cup olive oil and then a pinch or two of salt and pepper and adjust accordingly. I am really starting to love challenging myself to be creative and use up what I have in the fridge/pantry.
I always just dress the amount of salad we are going to eat that night otherwise it gets all soggy as a leftover…

Besides a tremendous amount of veggies, we also got some protein from the beans and the cheese in the tart. It was such a satisfying, healthy meal. I hope you try it.