Beetroot and spinach tarte tatin

Tarte tatin is a traditional French dessert - an apple pie baked upside down - but it lends itself well to a savoury filling too. I saw a recipe recently by Yotam Ottolenghi for a potato version. That's a bit too carb-laden for me but other root vegetables work nicely, partly because they have an inherent sweetness.

Like the traditional apple tarte, you need to add a little sugar in some form or other to generate a caramel that will help hold all the filling together.

What you need: 
2 medium cooked beetroot
Half a bag of fresh spinach
Butter
2 tsp demerara sugar
Salt, pepper
Half a pack of puff pastry

What to do:
Heat the oven to 220C. First steam the spinach, until it's slightly beyond wilted, set aside to cool then squeeze out as much water as you can. Cut the beetroot into 5mm slices. Melt a generous knob of butter in a medium-sized (20cm) ovenproof frying pan then sprinkle the sugar in. When the sugar has dissolved and the butter has started to sizzle, add the beetroot slices and gently fry them off on both sides (they should fill the pan in one layer). Scatter the spinach across the beetroot and season.

Roll out the pastry into a round just bigger than the pan. Take the pan off the heat and press the pastry over the beetroot and spinach, tucking the edges under. Pop it in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes until the pastry has risen up and is golden.

Take it out, let it cool a little and the, using oven gloves, place a plate bigger than the pan over it and quickly flip it over. The tarte should slip out intact onto the plate.

Cook's tips: 
Those vacuum packs of cooked beetroots that you find in the supermarkets are perfect for this if you don't want to boil or roast then peel the beetroot from scratch, plus they are vinegar-free and cheap. If you don't like beetroot, you can make this with rounds of carrots or long slices of parsnip - scatter a few fresh thyme leaves over them at the frying stage.

If you don't have an ovenproof frying pan, start the cooking in your usual frying pan then transfer the beetroot to a cake tin and finish the prepping in that.

When I buy packs of puff pastry, I usually cut them in half or even quarters and freeze what I'm not using. Half a pack is about right for this (a quarter pack makes a puff pizza pie).

A whole tatin on its own is quite a filling meal. I like a generous slice on the side of a roast or some pulled pork or pulled beef, then I'll finish it for lunch next day.

Puff pizza pie

Pie again. In one of those surreal flights of daydreamery, I imagine a world in which the Talking Heads sing a song called "More Songs About Pies and Food" and I don't even like the Talking Heads...

Anyhoo, this hybrid is something I've been improvising for a long time and it's one I'm particularly likely to rustle up when I already have some leftover puff pastry in the fridge, because I wouldn't buy puff pastry especially for this, and am also feeling somewhat lazy. It is, as the name suggests, a sort of pastry version of a pizza or an open, flat pie. Not unlike those dinky little puff pastry tartlets recipe books suggest you can knock out as a canapé or starter, except this one's a fully grown adult. And with the below ingredients, it's not dissimilar to a flammekuche.

I also call this my deli pie because I'm most likely to assemble it with the sort of nice things you can buy in a deli for a plate of antipasti. And, if I'm honest, my fridge is full of such deli ingredients for precisely that purpose - the evenings when I'm too lazy to cook and just want to sit in front of the TV with a plate of cheese, ham, olives and gherkins.

What you need: 
1/4 pack puff pastry
2 slices of Serrano ham
Artichoke hearts
4-5 pitted black olives
8-10 capers
1 mozzarella
Creme fraiche
Black pepper
Olive oil

What to do: 
Heat the oven to 220C. Sprinkle a little flour onto the work top and roll out the pastry into a 15cm by 15cm (6 inches) square. About 1cm (1/2 inch) in from the edge, score gently all the way round with a sharp knife, being careful not to cut right through.

Smear the base of the pastry, inside the scoreline, with a teaspoon of crème fraiche. Tear the ham into strips and the mozzarella into small pieces. Scatter the ham over the pastry, keeping everything inside the scoreline. Top with the olives, capers and a 3 or 4 artichoke hearts from a jar. Finish with the mozzarella. Drizzle with a little olive oil and season. Brush the edge of the pastry with a little olive oil and bake for about 15-20 minutes until the mozzarella has melted and the pastry has puffed up to a golden rim round the edges.

This goes down well with a green salad on the side.

Cook's tips: 
Pastry likes cold, so keep it in the fridge until you're ready to use it and wash your hands under the cold tap before you start. 

I never buy frozen pastry - when you live alone, a standard 500g slab is far too big, but if you defrost one, you can't refreeze the leftovers to use another time. Buy it fresh. You can quarter it, use what you need then portion and wrap the rest separately in cling film and pop them in the freezer. Then you can just defrost what you need each time.

The beauty of this sort of pie is you can fill it with whatever you have to hand - a little leftover cooked chicken, goat cheese, finely sliced peppers... You could also smear the base of the pie with a little passata or tomato purée. To finish it, you could scatter over a few torn basil leaves, if you have them, or tiny dollops of pesto.