before my camera died...

I made this savory sausage, cheese, tomato and pesto pie. I have to give a lot of credit to Andrew over at the Scottish Cow for this creation. I was thinking about a savory pie with summer vegetables and he posted a lovely recipe with fabulous pictures for one over on his blog the same week I was planning to make mine. I followed his advice on roasting the tomatoes and keeping them away from the bottom of the pie to minimize sogginess. This was really very good and different. I have been in the mood for different lately. I only want to make/eat food that I have never made/eaten before.

Here's how I did it - I made a basic double pie dough recipe (I used a basic pie dough over other choices because I did not want this to taste like pizza at all) and lined a 9 inch tart pan with half of it. I did not blind bake the dough, since I wanted to make a pie with a top crust and wanted to fold over the dough. I roasted the tomatoes before putting them in the pie, which not only eliminated a lot of the liquid, but gave the tomatoes a nice, concentrated flavor. Yummy! So, basically it was layers of cooked Italian sausage, pesto, the roasted tomatoes, pesto again, mozzarella cheese, tomatoes again, pesto again, Parmesan cheese and then the top pie dough, crimp around to look nice and rustic and then baked at 400 degrees for 20-30 minutes until golden brown. I was very pleased with how this turned out. The oil in the pesto did seep a bit into the top crust giving a portion of it a slight green tint but that is ok, I guess.


I served it with this creamy artichoke soup from Giada de Laurentis. The recipe can be found here. I will make this soup again and probably often, it was so good. I made some minor changes since I had canned artichokes on hand, I used those and I did not garnish the soup with more marscapone cheese as it just seemed like a lump of cheese. I did thinly slice chives for this dish but I am not certain why I took the picture before putting them on. Oh yeah, I am a lousy photographer!

Concerning the camera, my husband is encouraging me to hold out for the right camera. So, that means a shopping date one day instead of just ordering something on the web. Maybe my sister will want to go camera shopping with me while she is visiting at the end of this month!

I did manage to get all of the pictures that were stored on the memory card off of the dead camera, so I have about a weeks worth of blog posts and after that I will have to think of something else.