Goat cheese and chard and herbs oh my!

NY Times picture perfect pie.

I have so many bon appetit magazines, cookbooks, and food blogs for meal inspiration, that it can be overwhelming to choose one! I usually spend a little time (oh maybe several hours) perusing recipes and end up picking the one that looks like the most fun to make. When I saw this beautiful savory pie in the NY Times Health section, I thought, "I must make this crown of phyllo!" 

This recipe is essentially a quiche with a phyllo crust. I honestly cannot remember using phyllo dough ever, with the exception of when I helped my mom make baklava when I was 13. This was part of the excitement with this recipe was trying a different kind of crust, plus I just loved the way this looked in the picture (spoiler alert: my crust didn't turn out as perfect as the NY Times pic). Phyllo dough is a thin sheet of pastry made from wheat, water, and a little bit of oil. The sheets are super thin and dry out easily. The tricky part is layering the dough without tearing it. Each layer is brushed with a mixture of oil and butter to keep the layers together and so that they brown in the oven. 

Once you have layered the sheets to form a crust, you can start pulling the filling together. First, the swiss chard is chopped, blanched in boiling water, and transferred to ice water (this stops the cooking process). The crucial step is to squeeze as much water out of the chard as possible, so your crust doesn't become soggy. Second, you blend the eggs and goat cheese together in a food processor. Third, you add the chard and chopped herbs (I used tarragon, chives, and parsley). Then pour into the crust and bake.

That crust is overphyllo-ing.

As you can see the layers of my crust weren't as pretty as the NYTimes pic. However, I am fairly confident the flavors were similar. The phyllo makes for a particularly crunchy crust. And I especially enjoyed how the tarragon worked with the goat cheese. While traditional dough is probably what I prefer I would definitely make this again, especially when I am in the mood for something lighter (and easier to make).