COVID19: Onion Pie

I'm competing in the Chopped Christmas Virtual Challenge that the local extension office is hosting through Facebook. Three weeks of preliminary challenges - appetizer, entree, dessert - will determine the three competitors in the final challenge with the winner to be named sometime around new year.

Participants are given the same set of required ingredients and a deadline for creating a dish using them. Photos and recipes are submitted to the extension office and posted on the UT-TSU Extension Facebook page, then the public according to Facebook votes, an assessment by three neutral judges is made, and a winner and runner-up from each week's competitors are chosen. 

For the first week's required ingredients were cream cheese, onions, garlic powder, cranberries, and pecans. Because I've been having so much fun lately with pastry and making a pie of some sort every few days, I came up with the idea for a Cranberry-Pecan Crostata. I made a scruffy puff pastry-pie pastry hybrid, and by "scruffy," I don't mean it looked rough or haggard - it was flawless - but the  method of pulling together and folding pastry with a massive load of chilly butter to create layers and layers of deliciousness isn't stuffy, overly-precise, or labor intensive. 

After rolling out my pastry, I used a ruler to lay out a perfect rectangle, trimmed away the ends, and created a folded edge. An egg, garlic powder, salt, and pepper were mixed into softened cream cheese before I spread it across the pastry. Toasted pecans, reconstituted dried cranberries, and slices of red onion completed the crostata. I brushed a beautiful egg wash around the edges and crumbled some flakes of Maldon on for good measure.

I thought the resulting creation was beautiful, and Jack said it looked like something in Southern Living, but it didn't catch the eye of the folks on Facebook in a good way. I got less votes than anyone else by a fairly wide margin, and I continue to consider the futility of trying to sell onion pie to the masses, no matter how good it might taste in real life.

Because it did taste fantastic!!