Bitter Green Salad Tart with Feta and Chilies

Every week, Caroline Wright creates simple, civilized recipes for Food52 that feed four -- for under $20, in under 20 minutes.

Today: Treat your puff pastry like pizza and turn it into a summertime tart.

Before the peak of summer (as in, before I can no longer stand to fire up my oven), I love to make pizzas, or a simple tart like this one. It's an easy way to focus on a single summer ingredient, while also making the best use of the whole bundle of greens you have on hand.

Here, I treated puff pastry just like pizza dough -- pizza stone and all -- to see if I could bake a crispy tart in twenty minutes. It worked brilliantly; in fact, the crust on the bottom of the dough was so crisp I may never return to a baking sheet again. The resulting tart was dense with flavor from the bitter greens, but cut with a richness from the puff pastry and a brininess from the feta. This lovechild of a pizza and a tart (with a bit of salad thrown in for good measure) was a tasty and simple summer meal that I’ll be making again before the heat hits full tilt!

Bitter Green Salad Tart with Feta and Chilies 

Serves 4

Flour for surface
1/2 (17.3-ounce) package puff pastry, thawed if frozen
3 cups mixed bitter greens, such as dandelion, mustard greens, kale, or arugula
2 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
One 4-ounce block feta, sliced
1 serrano, sliced
2 teaspoons lemon juice

See the full recipe (and save and print it) here. 

As a freelance food writer and cook, I first wrote this style of recipe as a column on my blog, The Wright Recipes, as an excuse to cook good food for my friends in a quick and simple way. 

Twenty-Dollar, Twenty-Minute™ Meals grew into a cookbook that was published by Workman in May 2013. The recipes found here are original, made especially for Food52 to once again celebrate simple food with friends.

Photo by Caroline Wright