We all know it’s important to eat breakfast. However, if you’re anything like me (please, just pretend), you’ve probably found yourself in a breakfast rut a time or two. You eat the same box of Special K Red Berries every day until you find yourself licking powdered strawberry dust from the bottom of the box off of your fingers, enough “egg in a cup” omelettes to make you cluck, or fruit-and-yogurt parfaits every day until no meal looks normal unless its components are served to you layered in a see through plastic cup… you catch my drift.
So I got all excited when I came across this March 2009 recipe from Food and Wine for Melissa Rubel Jacobson’s “Honeyed Yogurt and Blueberry Tart with Ginger Crust.”
I stared at the recipe for awhile. I looked at the picture. Then, it dawned on me—“That’s really just breakfast parfait pretending to be a dessert.”
With a few very minor modifications, I turned this already easy recipe into a cute little breakfast tart that you can make with stuff you probably already have in your fridge/pantry.
The ingredients for the filling remain the same as the original recipe. Strain 2 cups of plain, fat free Greek style yogurt in the fridge overnight. Just dump the yogurt into a strainer lined with a paper towel (or a coffee filter, or cheese cloth). Dock the strainer over a bowl to catch all the liquid that will drain out. This is what the yogurt looks like after it strained overnight and all day the next day, but just overnight is fine.
Or, maybe you can muster the motivation in the morning before work to get the straining action going, and then make it when you get home for breakfast the next morning. Either way. I’m not a control freak or anything. I’m not telling you how to live your life. Or, make your tart.
Whenever you are doing it, before you start “cooking” (dumping and mixing) is a good time to preheat your oven to 350.
Jacobson’s recipe includes a graham cracker crust with ginger. I think that sounds scrumptious; but I felt like I needed to use something a little more power packed if this was going to serve as both the first thing I eat in the morning and the thing that’s going to keep me from getting hungry until lunch. Soooooooo… I replaced the graham cracker crumb/ginger crust with granola. Lo and behold, I had just slightly less than a cup and a half of this lovely Bear Naked Fruit & Nut granola in my cabinet, so into the bowl it went.
The original recipe calls for 3 tablespoons of butter, and a tablespoon of sugar. I cut out the sugar completely, and cut the butter down to just under 2 tablespoons. I keep a carton of egg whites in my fridge pretty much all the time for… reasons… so that ingredient was already on hand, as well. Three tablespoons of egg whites from a carton = 1 large egg white. If you don’t have egg whites in a carton, just get your egg white the old-fashioned way— you know, with an actual egg.
Melt the butter and pour it over the granola. Then, in goes the egg white. Mix it all up. If you find that your mixture is a little “soupy” after all that, you can let it sit for 5 minutes to let the granola soak up some of the moisture (or just pour a little of the liquid off right away if you’re impatient like I am).
I happen to have one of those removable bottom round tart pan things, so that’s what I used for my tart. If you don’t, just use a pie tin, or a brownie pan, or whatever you have handy that looks about right. Dump the granola into the pan of your choosing and smoosh it onto the bottom until it looks generally like a crust.
All smooth-like, slide the pan into your preheated (riiiiiiight?) oven for about 15-18 minutes.
While the crust is becoming, uh, crusty, you can mix up your yogurt filling. It’s the easiest thing you’ll do all day. Dump the strained yogurt into a mixing bowl, then add your 2 tablespoons of honey. I also added about a teaspoon of grated lemon zest, because the spirit moved me. If nothing, spirit or otherwise, is moving you to grate lemon zest, I ain’t mad atcha.
Whatever you and the spirits decided to put in that bowl, mix it all up until it’s pretty smooth and all your ingredients are well incorporated.
Now you can wash your blueberries, and kinda pat them all dry so you don’t get weird blueberry water puddles in the top of your tart.
When your timer goes off, or your gut tells you it’s time, pull the crust out of the oven. I know it doesn’t really look that different from the pre-baked crust in this picture, but I knew it was done because I touched the granola and it was totally dry, and felt like it was all one cohesive layer. It also looked a little more like a big granola cookie up close, instead of just mushy stuff smooshed into the bottom of a pan.
Turn your oven off. I always forget to do that.
Let the crust cool for about 10 or 15 minutes— however long your patience lasts. Then, pour the yogurt-honey mixture into the crust and spread it all around until it’s a layer that basically reaches all the edges of the crust.
Top with the blueberries, then drizzle a little (don’t go crazy!) more honey over the top just for drama. Also, because it’s fun to drizzle honey.
Admire your handiwork. No, really, you just made a kick ass breakfast with dairy and fruit and good energy carbs and proteins and also it’s really pretty. You should pat yourself on the back.
If you’re going to eat it now, cut it up into wedges and have yourself some breakfast. If you plan on having it tomorrow morning, you can just stick it into the fridge. That’s what I did, and it was absolutely delicious the next day. Just a word of caution though— the crust will absorb the moisture from the yogurt. It still had a little crunch, but if you want it to retain that “right out o’ the oven” crispiness, you can bake off the crust and mix the filling the night before, but wait until the morning to put it all together just before you serve it.
I took mine to work and folks ate it, and thought it was delicious, and all that jazz. I got a lot of, “Is that cream cheese?” and when I told them the filling was made from fat free plain yogurt they were pretty stunned. See? Healthy doesn’t have to be boring and tasteless and no fun.
P.S. You know that thing we did with straining the plain yogurt overnight? You can use that strained yogurt for a lot of other things, not just breakfast tart. For instance, this Roasted Garlic Tzatziki, which can be used as dip, or instead of mayo on a sammich, or on a baked potato, or in a wrap.
Try it! It’s really quite tasty.