I have been experimenting with this dish for ages, first as a puff pastry option and now as a shortcrust pastry tart. Can you tell I love pastry? HA!

This vegan dish is super quick to make, looks great and is very filling. It serves 4 as a main dish and even more as a starter!

Ingredients
For the Pesto
100g pistachios
Handful of basil
Handful of mint
60ml olive oil
100ml water (add slowly to change consistency)

For the topping
2 Medium sweet potatoes
200g Carrots – baby carrots halved or carrot batons
200g parsnips – thinly sliced
Agave Syrup
50g roasted red peppers
Basil leaves for decoration
Also needed:
Sheet of Jus Rol shortcrust pastry

Method

1 – Preheat the oven to 180 degrees

2 – On a non stick baking tray, place the carrots and parsnips and cover with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Cook in the oven for around 30 minutes. When cooked, squirt a little Agave syrup over them and place back in to the oven for 5 minutes until golden brown and sticky!

3 – Meanwhile peal and chop the sweet potato into chunks and boil for 15-20 minutes until soft. Then mash them up.

4 – Roll out the shortcrust pastry and lift into a quiche/flan tin, pushing into the corners of the tin with your fingers to create a good shape. I used a 28cm dish for this. Make sure the dish is lightly greased so that you can get it out after baking! Cover the edges with oat milk so they go nice and brown and trim them down. Line the bottom of the pastry with baking paper and weigh it down with baking beads. Bake for 20 minutes until golden brown. Remove from the oven.

5 – Meanwhile, in a food processor, whizz together the pistachios, olive oil, mint and basil. Add the water afterwards to create the consistency you want. I usually use 100ml water so that it is easier to coat the pastry. You may need to transfer to a hand blender to really get it all creamy in texture.

6 – When the pastry has been removed from the oven, top with the pistachio pesto, mashed sweet potato , carrot and parsnip. Then decorate with basil leaves and crushed pistachios.

We ate this as part of a main dish with hasselback potatoes. It was scrummy. We also reheated it the next day in the microwave for lunch. It took about 2 minutes to reheat and was just as nice the next day.