Cherry Tomato Puff Pastry Tart

Puff pastry is your friend.  And if you don't know that yet, let me introduce you by making this quick and easy summer appetizer.

Frozen puff pastry is one of the greatest things you can keep in your freezer.  You can make last minute appetizers with it, desserts, breakfast pastries and use it to top pot pies.  You can certainly make your own puff pastry, but it is very time consuming and the commercial version in the grocery store is very good. I like making these very easy appetizers with puff pastry.  You just lay out a sheet of the pastry, top it with cheese and a vegetable and bake.  

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Parmesan Rosemary Flatbreads

We sure bake a lot of bread in this house.  I used to make focaccia bread a couple of times a week, but lately this incredibly easy artisan bread has been on our dinner table most nights.  I wanted to get out of that rut and thought I'd make these easy herbed flatbreads for a change.  I hadn't made these in ages but they are easy and fun to make and can be also used as an appetizer.

This delicious bread is sort of a cross between a cracker and a bread.  It's a great excuse to break out your pasta rollers, if you have them.  The dough is divided into small pieces and passed through pasta rollers to make a nice flat bread.  If you don't have pasta rollers, just roll them out by hand but the pasta rollers make it so much easier and faster.  These little breads don't have to be a uniform size or shape - it's kind of rustic anyway if they are not.  

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Strawberry Cheesecake Parfaits

We all love cheesecake, right?  But it does take time and effort.  You have to make the crust and bake it, then make the filling and, if you do it right, bake the cheesecake in a water bath.  Well, I'm going to show you how to make cheesecake without any baking at all.  It's a deconstructed cheesecake and you layer it in parfait glasses. The cheesecake filling doesn't have any eggs - that's why you don't have to bake it.  These are so easy and you can even make them up ahead of time and refrigerate them.

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