Can you Quiche Quiche?

Quiche is definitely one of those easy and versatile dishes, after all most ingredients taste lovely wrapped in a blanket of eggs and cheese! With all this great weather, the first thing I did was load up on fresh veggies to grill and realize a few days later, I had cooked up way too many for any one person to eat and not turn into one themselves.

Using my standard recipe, I made a yummy easy lunch creation:

- Preheat oven to 425 F and grease a pie dish liberally
- Cut the crusts off of 5 pieces of whole wheat sandwich bread and lay down on the bottom of the pie dish
- Pile on the grilled veggies (sliced and seasoned with olive oil, balsamic, salt and pepper, then grilled until cooked through and slightly charred)
- Add a cup of grated cheese - for this is just used the regular old parmesan cheese out of a can and it worked great!
- Beat 4 whole, large eggs really well with 2 tbls of low fat milk. Pour over the veggies and cheese

- Bake for 35-45 min until set and browning on top, allow to cool for 10 min before serving

And Voila!

Chef's notes: for meat lovers, bacon, onion and chedder cheese makes a great alternative; for an asian flavor, use sauteed, shredded carrots, red cabbage, green onions in sesame oil and a bit of rice vinegar, and use chopped cilantro instead of the cheese.

tiny little quiches

Ever since we read this post from bread & honey, we've been meaning to make mini crustless quiches. Really, they're the perfect dinner - easy (most of these ingredients are just measured with your hand, like in antiquity... or with horses), small portions (and thus good for leftovers), healthier than with crust, and made pretty much only with ingredients already found in the fridge. You can modify this in pretty much any possible way you want, so we omitted some of the stuff we didn't have.

Mini crustless quiches (makes 6-8, depending on how big your handfuls are)

Veggies (we used some grated carrot and a handful of broccoli)
4 eggs
3/4 c milk
garlic (one clove is suggested, but we tossed in some more for good measure)
handful chopped spinach
large handful of grated sharp cheddar
pinch of flour
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 350. Saute your chosen vegetables with garlic until they soften.

In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, milk, spinach, cheddar, and pinch of flour. Season with a small pinch of salt & some pepper.

We used muffin cups, which were actually a little messy and yielded a poor presentation, but you can grease a muffin tin with some butter. In the bottom of each cup, spoon in a small amount of sauteed vegetables. Use a large spoon to drizzle egg mixture over each muffin cup. You can fill almost all the way, since they don't puff up much.

Bake for about 20-25 minutes, until firm and puffy. Allow to cool a little before attempting to remove.


Keeping with the "whatever's in the apartment" mentality, we ate these with a slice of bread, but for leftovers we'll probably whip up some brown rice for a good starchy side.

cheese and vegetable quiche

Ingredients:
Pastry:
200 grams flour
100 grams margarine
water (2 -3 tablespoons approx)
salt

Filling:
Eggs (2/3), milk and....anything! In this case I included tomato, garlic, onion, spinach and mushroom, with feta cheese in one, and cheddar cheese in the other. (feta quiche is on the right).

1. Heat oven to 250 degrees celcius (or 230 with fan oven).

2. Make the pastry by sieving the flour with some salt and then mixing in all the butter. use a little water to make it a bit more moist and then knead the whole mixture together. Then use a rolling pin, and with some flour sprinkled over the counter, roll out portions of the pastry to line the dishes. (this is the procedure for Short Pastry...I chose it simply because it was the easiest!). Line the dishes with the pastry, trim the edges, and prick the pastry at the bottom a few times with a fork.

3. You need to cook the pastry by itself for a short while first, so pop into oven at 250 degrees celcius (or 230 if its a fan oven), for 3-5 minutes. When the pastry is done, take it from the oven and flatten it down if it has risen. Lower the oven to 200 - 230 degrees.

4. Chop all the vegetables and put them into the pastry lined dish. Add the cheese and season with salt and pepper.

5. Mix the eggs and add a little milk and seasoning. Then pour the mixture over the vegetables in the dish. Try to make sure the egg is covering all of it, in particular the spinach leaves...don't want them going all crackley....

6. Cook the quiche in the oven at 200 - 230 degrees for 15 - 20 minutes.

Observation: I used grated chedder in one, and when cooked, the cheese was spread evenly throughout the whole quiche, and had a really strong flavour. It was much nicer than the feta quiche, in which I had put chunks of the feta. But I should have put in more, it wasn't as prominent a flavour as I hoped it would be...so definitely overdo it on the chunks of feta cheese if you want the flavour to come through properly!