Quiche Gone Wrong

You know how sometimes everything that can go wrong does?  That was mostly the story of our quiche, as you'll see below.

It started with the eggs.  I swore I had enough in the fridge, I'd even bought some the other day, but when my son went looking, he came back with only two.  We needed four.  I sent him out to the hen house and lucky for us they'd decided to actually earn their keep that morning, because he returned with two eggs. 

He made the dough and pressed it into the pan.  His sister wanted to do the dough too, so there was some argument over that.  It was a weeknight so I'd decided we weren't going to have time to chill the dough for long, just a few minutes before I blind baked it.  I turned the oven on (or so I thought....), I put the crust in the fridge when he was done and...totally forgot about it.

Next step in the recipe was to steam the spinach.  Now here's where the microwave provided the bright spot in the evening's escapades.  I was not about to get out a giant pot of water, boil it, load spinach into a steamer, where it would take on a lot of water, and then wash all those dishes.  Instead I piled it into a big bowl, put some plastic wrap over the mound and stuck it in the microwave on 'fresh vegetables'.  A couple of minutes later I had a nicely drained pile of cooked spinach sitting on my chopping board.  A couple of papertowels helped squeeze the water out and voila - cooked, drained spinach that didn't have that chewy frozen-spinach texture.  This was the high point.

I got the crust out (forgetting that I meant to blind bake it) and poured the quiche mixture in.  Then remembered about the blind baking.  Oh well, another experiment.  I opened the oven.  Stone cold.  I had set the temperature without turning on the oven.  So I cranked it, while the quiche sat in the uncooked crust, and waited.  When it was almost warm, I put the quiche in the oven, set the timer for the higher end of the recommended cooking time (40 mn) and retired to the living room with the sous-chefs to do homework and nibble on chips and salsa.

When the timer beeped, I opened the oven and saw this:

I guess that oven heated right up, huh?

So, after I peeled all the burnt bits off and put them in the chicken's pile, here's what I put on the table:

The ending of the story isn't that bad though.  The quiche was really very good, the crust, while it would have improved with a blind baking, was done.  The filling was 1/2 a large onion and 2 cloves of mashed garlic, sauted with one chorizo sausage, crumbled, then mixed with 2/3 cup half and half, 2 eggs, 1/4 cup parmasean cheese and 1 bag of spinach, microwave-steamed and chopped.  Some salt and pepper and it was good to go into the crust.  We recommend blind-baking the crust.  And not burning the quiche.

Passable for a weeknight.

Endless Summer

Summertime always stretches out in my mind as a long opportunity to catch up on all those things I've been putting off.  And of coures, it always sneaks up quickly, throwing my routines off, bringing just as many   new ideas and as new minutes of sunlight.  Ah, summertime, whoever said your living was easy?

A month into it, the routine is a little more settled, and we've had time to tackle a few of the chores, making room for some fun.

We spent the holiday weekend with friends, riding horses and exploring a new place.  Our assignment was simple: dessert.  In an effort to keep refining the strawberry tart, we tried a new version and, apologies to our hosts, it wasn't quite as good.

You can see here that the dough was a little too thick around the edges, but instead of sacrificing some, we crammed it in.  That wasn't a good idea because the corner of the crust came out underbaked.  I also used this white quiche pan, instead of my metal one with the removable edge, so the crust didn't crisp as much as usual.  This recipe was a very basic sweet crust, with a little sugar and no eggs.  The last one we made was more like a cookie dough, with more sugar and eggs - it was more tender and made a better crust for these cool summer tarts.

Of course, we hadn't yet tried the crust, so the kid-chef filled it with our pastry cream and made a great whirl of strawberries on the top.  We all took turns critiqueing the results and I think we've got the right combination down now.

Phew!

On to the next summertime task!