Tomato and Corn Pie

This one made me laugh.

Specifically, the proportions of this recipe were riotous. Two sticks of butter and one cup of cheddar in the crust alone. SEVEN CUPS of cherry tomatoes. ONE WHOLE BUNCH of scallions (Ok, this particular time I used shallots, but still - a whole bunch of scallions is a lot of scallions! Not that I mind. Using up remnants of fresh herbs is one of the sisyphean tasks of my kitchen). Three cups of corn kernels! I could go on.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me how huge this thing was going to be until I was knee-deep in it. That’s almost not an exaggeration. This dough gets rolled out to SEVENTEEN INCHES. It was verging on being too big for the baking sheet. 

I said it in the video, but there’s no other way to fairly describe it - I felt like I was a midwestern mother of some innumerable number of teenage boys who needed to house down a huge meal before the “big game”. As it happens, the only other recipe that has made me feel like a midwestern mom is a steel cut oat bread recipe from my friend’s friend’s grandma who actually was a midwestern mom. (That recipe makes 5 loaves of bread, for those of you wondering.) So I do not bestow the midwestern mom metaphor lightly. It’s even particularly fitting here because the recipe’s author, Erin Jeanne McDowell, is a proud Kansan.

But back to the pie - ahem, galette*. Somehow the sheer mass of ingredients combined to make a fresh, tasty, and dare I say light (?) dinner. Proudly, over the course of a few days there was not a crumb left. Which either speaks to how delicious this turned out to be, my own gluttony, or both.

Anyway, the next time you need a laugh and/or to feed a crowd, this recipe is it.

*A galette is free-form, whereas a pie is baked in a pie dish. This recipe is titled as a “pie” but I think that’s just to maximize SEO, slash EJM was about to release her cookbook called “The Book on Pie” #branding.

Recipe from Erin Jeanne McDowell, New York Times.