Mango Custard Tart

SP and I made deliciously juicy mango custard tarts using this Fruit Tart recipe. The tart includes defrosted frozen mango, sliced and layered onto a light custard cream that is enrobed by a sweet buttery crust. The above tart was decorated by me (with the aid of a spoon, because the mango was surprisingly slippery!). The tart below was decorated by the SP, the Super Pastry-making-guy.



Notes on the Method:

• With the same amount of dough and cream, instead of one tart, we ended up with two generous tarts that were smaller - 6 to 7 inches in diameter?
• As I didn't feel like washing my rolling pin, we just pushed chunks of dough into the pans and flattened them with our fingers. This worked pretty well, though the edges should probably get more dough next time. The holes in the bottom need to be larger and more numerous so that there is less puffing of the pastry. Also, we only froze the flattened-out tart shells for about 20-30 minutes (while we made the custard cream), so there was no prechilling of the dough.
• The dough, when done, really does clump up into a ball when stirring with a spoon (or for the other folk, a mixing blade)!
• We used fat-free milk for the custard cream even though the recipe specified fat/low-fat. I don't think that it matters, taste-wise.
• A lot of the ingredients were NOT dutifully measured, but everything turned out fine!
• We replaced the corn starch with three tbsp of white flour in the cream. I think this is what gave the custard a more doughy/floury/pudding texture as opposed to a light pastry cream texture. Either way, it was still not too heavy (not like egg tarts at all!), had the viscosity of chocolate mousse, and paired well with the crust. Before incorporation of the heated milk, the egg yolk mixture had the consistency of pancake batter. On the heat, after merely a few minutes, the cream started to thicken!
• The only fruit we used was mango. Fortunately, mango is really shiny, meaning that there is no need for an apricot jam glaze!

Thickening custard on the heat!

Shells - baked, and filled with custard.

I am pleased with this tart because I can now successfully gauge when custard is "ready", and so can SP! This is a skill that will help him woo the women (far far far in the future)! Also, we had heaps of frustrating fun decorating with irregularly-shaped mango slices. The best end to the day was, of course, sharing a whole tart and watching the Q&A video on Curiosity's second day on Mars. 

Changes I would make include substituting whole wheat flour for the white flour, using two egg yolks instead of three, and adding more corn starch & milk. I would also make the give the sides of the tart thicker crusts so that they don't burn as much, and I would poke more holes into the crust to let air out (so the dough doesn't puff up).

Sitar Indian Restaurant

It's so hot today.

My room's AC is also pretty terrible.

Anyway, TJ, CL and BN and I met up at The Greek Lady for dinner, but after looking through the vegetarian options, we decided to go elsewhere. It's not that their selection was scanty; it was just that everything vegetarian was basically the animal version, sans animal. For example, the vegetarian gyro was lettuce, tomato, feta cheese, sauce and pita. Uh, where is the protein part? Where is the falafel?

After much wandering around in 96F weather (yes, I was watching the really vapid "news" - how the heck is "Oh. Today is 96F." allotted to 15 minutes worth of news?), BN decided to take us to Sitar, an Indian restaurant/buffet place. Apparently, lunch is around $8 and dinner is $11.75+tax, and there is a student discount of 10% [allegedly]. We each ended up paying $13.

I'm not really sure whether or not the mango juice was free, because the menu claims that it's $2.50, but either way, we all ate a lot of food and laughed at many jokes. The juice was unusually sweet, pulp-free (sigh.), and chilled. TJ put pepper in BN's water, but he didn't notice. Chances are, the pepper, being an insignificant amount and also insoluble, sank to the bottom of the glass.

I don't know the names of many Indian dishes, unfortunately, but the naan bread was amazing. Actually, it tasted kind of like the flour tortillas that my mum used to make, which means that either my mum unknowingly made naan, or the naan just tastes really similarly to flour tortillas (well, not Qdoba/Chipotle flour tortillas. Those are more gluteny). The spinach and paneer cheese was really delicious paired with the naan. On its own, the cheese was great, but the spinach was too spicy for my liking. Actually, a lot of the food was too spicy for me (I guess I'm just not that tolerant). The yellow lentil thing that is covering the naan in the picture was really great, too.

Plate 2. Unlike at Penn Dining, it is kind of hard to consume more than 1.5 plates of food. Also, the rice had animal pieces in it even though it was labelled vegetarian and BN mistook the animal pieces for nuts, which I then mistook as cashews. It turns out it was something chewy and meaty. :( The potato in the potato and green beans was really great, but the green beans were really salty and wilted (due to the salt, of course). I loved the potato samosas and the chickpeas! At that point, however, I really felt like not eating anymore Indian food for at least a few months. Seriously, I was that full and I honestly do not crave Indian food anymore. Although the food was pretty good, I think that if I were to buy food from here again, it'd be the potato samosas!

Fruit watery custard-y thingy. The fruit? canned apples. Actually, they're canned pears, but they look like apples (the red parts), so I'm not really sure what they REALLY are, but they're definitely canned. The custard part was pretty good, though, although it was less viscous than yoghurt. I guess it's a bit confusing for me because I prefer custards to be super thick.

Vanilla ice cream (50% of it melted, because the bowl was warm) with some carrot+nut+syrup, which tasted kind of like rice pudding. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't something I'd crave.

Unlike peanut butter sandwiches, chocolate, and avocado sushi, which I can never get tired of, Indian food is something to be enjoyed only occasionally, although I do love it.

Sitar Indian Restaurant, 60th S 38th St (around 38th and Chestnut St.), Philadelphia