Tart with Blue Grape Hyacinths

The Muscari commutatum or Blue Grape Hyacinth, is one of my favourite spring flowers. Here where we live it grows everywhere at this time of year..From the end of January it starts to sprout and if the weather is fine it is one of the first signs of spring.

It has a very soft and light aroma and generally it is a flower that I really love…

I knew that you could grow this plant from bulbs and I had collected many dry bulbs from the park to plant in the garden.

What I didn’t know, when I was a little boy, was that the bulbs we ate during Lent were the bulbs from this plant and I also didn’t know that the stem and the flowers were edible as well after boiling them or could be used in an omelette, especially in Crete.

I learnt all that when I started to discover all about edible flowers.

I was reminded of the little flowers by a post which was uploaded by my friend Yanna Balafouti on FaceBook and I said to myself: Shouldn’t I go out and collect some myself?

So I went into the park and collected a bunch of flowers and put them in a vase…

I was overtaken by an incredible urge, I wanted to make something; I had a tart base in the freezer waiting and I thought I would make a tart which I could decorate with the flowers..

I had a beautiful blue ceramic tart baking tray and thought I would put it in there..

And it turned really really beautifully…and very tasty.

Diffuculty: 2 out of 3

Duration:40 minutes prep and 1 hour baking

Serves:12

Ingredients

Ingredients for the base you can find here

For the filling

6 eggs

200 g of full fat milk or the same ammount of Creme or any combination of the two

cheese

cold cuts

grape hyacinth flowers

a little bit of dill

salt and pepper

Method

Preheat the oven at 190 celcius fan.

Place the rolled out base in a tart pan 26cm in diameter.

Put some greaseproof paper in the tart pan on top of the pastry and fill up the space with rice, pulses or whatever weight you have to keep the paper in place to blind bake the pastry.

Bake the tart base for 20 mins.

Take the tart base out of the oven, remove the paper and weights.

Meanwhile we prepare the filling.

Mix the milk with eggs in a bowl.

We chop most of the flowers and stalks and scatter them on the tart base.

If we have big pieces of cheese or cold cuts we place them in the tart.

Mix our herbs and spices with the egg mixture and we empty in the tart pan.

Decorate with the rest of the flowers

Bake for 20-30 minutes till the tart has a beautiful golden colour.

Let cool on a rack and serve..

Notes

If your tart pan is ceramic it may take more time to be fully baked especially on the bottom of the pan.

The stalks and flowers are a but bitter. If bitter is not your taste blanch them for a few minutes.. this helps.