Is it still pastry …

… if it has very little fat? I suppose it has to be - originally pastry had none at all, and was just used as a container for food to cook in.

Last week's apple crumbles were so yummy in my bentos, but they added rather more calories than I'd have liked. I thought I'd see how little fat and sugar I could get away with and still have yummy fruit desserts - actually measuring the ingredients this time, so I could be sure of the calories.

I dragged 150 g of these gooseberries out of the freezer …


… my bush as become very prolific just in the last couple of years, and I have a lot of them that need eating before the next crop appears. I cooked them with two teaspoons of sugar until they were soft and most of the copious amounts of exuded juice had evaporated.

I made a sort of pastry with 1 cup of flour, 25 g butter, some baking powder so it wouldn't be a brick, and water.


Total calories = 580 Cal.

Just as a little aside here - see those black things (thing then, but there's one on the other end too) on my rolling pin? I've been trying to find rolling pin rings for ages; you can buy them on Amazon.com but they won't ship overseas (how weird is that?), however I can't find them in New Zealand. Kiwi ingenuity to the fore, I gave the man at the seals and bearings supplier I drive past every day a bit of a shock when I brought in my rolling pin in to get fitted with O-rings.


They had two different thicknesses of the appropriate diameter O-ring, so I bought a couple of each. These ones are the thinner ones. They really are great for helping you to roll pastry of an even thickness.

My 580 Cal of pastry was divided between five silicon cups for asparagus quiches containing asparagus, cheese, and egg …


… four gooseberry tarts, and about another tart's worth of "tester pastry" that I just chucked in the oven and ate when it was cooked to check for brickishness.


The "pastry" is a bit more like a cream cracker than pastry, but it is nice and crisp and perfectly acceptable.

Here's what everything looked like when it was cooked:


A bit of egg overflow in the quiches; thank goodness for silicon.

By my calculations the quiches come in at 100 Cal each, and the tarts at 78 Cal.