IMBB26 & WBW21: Asparagus Goat Cheese Tart with Argyle Chardonnay

Well, I kind of dropped the ball on this one. See, this month Wine Blogging Wednesday paired up with Is My Blog Burning to create “Fabulous Favorites Festival” — awesome. Except, I was looking for an announcement for IMBB26 and when I didn’t see one, I just assumed it was coming up later in the month. Oops. It was actually due Friday, May 19th. And it wasn’t just IMBB26 but it was WBW21 too. This combined event was hosted by evil-genius-mastermind Lenndevours and it’s such a great idea that I hope I am able to sneak in right under the wire.

The instructions were to either pick a favorite wine and create a meal to go with it or to pick a favorite dish and choose a wine for accompaniment. My thing being mainly the food, I decided on the latter scenario.

With that in mind, I made an asparagus and goat cheese tart, which I paired with an 2004 Argyle Chardonnay. I love making puff pastry tarts and asparagus just seemed like the logical choice, since it’s in season right now. For the wine, I looked a few miles south to the Argyle winery, in the Dundee area of the Willamette Valley. We’re quite fond of them as we’ve gone to a wine tasting dinner that they did here in Portland, where we had a great time. A few bottles of wine will do that. We also came away from this dinner with a new-found love for the term “knucklehead”.

My dish and wine settled on, I went to work.

Asparagus Goat Cheese Tart
1 sheet puff pastry, thawed
5 oz goat cheese, room temp
3 oz gruyere or similar cheese, shredded
1/4 tsp dried tarragon
zest from 1/2 lemon
2 cloves garlic
1 bunch asparagus, washed
1 tsp olive oil
sea salt & black pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine goat cheese, zest, garlic and tarragon. Mix to combine. I found a fork was the best tool for this. A whisk just trapped the goal cheese in between the tines, creating a sort of goat cheese jail. However you mix it, do so and set aside..

Roll out your puff pastry sheet until it is a bit bigger — around 16 inches by 10 inches but it doesn’t have to be exact. Score an edge around the pastry, with a knife, about 1 inch from the edge. You don’t want to cut all the way through, just make a border. Then, prick the interior of the rectangle with a fork to keep it from puffing up as much as the outer border.

Bake in a 400 degree oven until lightly golden. Then, place little crumbles of your goat cheese within the border of the tart. Don’t try to spread it too much as it’ll pull pieces of the puff pastry off — I learned the hard way. You can pat it down a little though. It’ll all melt a bit and flatten down in the oven anyway, so don’t get too invloved with constructing a uniformly flat goat cheese bed. Next, sprinkle the grated cheese over the goat cheese.

Trim asparagus spears so that you remove the tough ends, but also wind up with spears about the same size as the tart interior. Sneaky! Arrange the asparagus in a single layer over the cheese, alternating direction so it looks pretty.

Drizzle with the olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper and return to the oven for about 20 minutes, or until asparagus is tender.

Let cool a few minutes and cut gently, into six pieces. Serve with the wine of your choice and enjoy. We liked the Argyle chardonnay as it was very cold and crisp and went well with the tart.

Thanks again to Lenndevours for hosting the Fabulous Favorites Festival!

Tagged with: IMBB26 and WBW21.