Kwee-Chee *Edited Again*

Otherwise known as quiche.

The dictionary defines quiche as a pie-like dish consisting of an unsweetened pastry shell filled with a custard and usually containing cheese and other ingredients, as vegetables, seafood, or ham. Pretty much all of my cookbooks say about the same thing.

Since Organic Mama bought WAY more eggs than she needed for the fixings for her daughter’s bat mitzvah, she needs some good, egg-intensive dishes. For her, I’m posting my favorite quiche recipe.

I don’t fuss with crust. I find that I can never get both the quiche and the crust done quite to my liking, so I skip the crust part altogether. I make up for this by serving my quiche with some sort of hearty bread - usually a crusty French bread accompanied by a little too much butter.

If you DO want to have a crusted quiche, make (or buy) enough pie dough for a 9-inch pan. Dock the pastry (poke it full of little holes with a fork), weight it down with pie weights or dried beans, and pre-bake it in a 375° oven for about 30 minutes. Remove the crust and allow it to cool completely, and turn the oven down to 300°.

If you choose NOT to fuss with crust, butter a 9-inch pie plate and set it aside. Beat together 4 eggs with 2 cups of light cream (the dairy you use can be varied to your liking and/or what happens to be in your fridge at the moment). To this, stir in a pinch of salt and a grind or two of pepper and set aside.

In the bottom of your pie plate (or, alternately, in your pre-baked and cooled crust), put whatever extras you’d like to have in your quiche. My personal favorites are stewed tomatoes, onion and bacon (both the onion and the bacon having been cooked together over medium heat until soft and crisp, respectively), then a little too much grated sharp Cheddar cheese. Really, though, the possibilities are just about endless: spinach and goat cheese or feta, asparagus and gruyere, ham and swiss- really, let your imagination go. Here, for example, we have tonight’s offering; turkey ham, diced red onion, and chopped asparagus with Cheddar:

I sometimes use quiche as a “fridge-purge” dish; I’ll root around in my refrigerator and come up with all kinds of interesting combinations. As far as quantities for the extras go, use your best judgment. About a half cup of each (maybe a little heavier on the cheese) for a 9 inch pie pan would probably do it.

On top of your extras, gently pour over the egg and cream, sprinkle over more of your cheese (if you have any left over), and bake in the center of a pre-heated 300° oven and bake 30-45 minutes, or until the quiche is slightly browned and set (if you’re using a crust and it starts to brown too much, as it’s likely to do, make a little ring of tin foil to shield it). How long it takes will depend on how deep the pie plate is and the accuracy of your oven’s thermostat. I do a doneness test by poking the center of the quiche with a knife; if the knife comes out mostly clean, we’re in business.

Let the quiche cool for about 10 minutes - it’ll slice more cooperatively that way - and serve hot or cold. Honestly, I tend to at least double this recipe and make the quiche in a buttered, rectangular glass cake pan - one little pie never seems sufficient, especially since it fridges so well and makes for a fantastic next-day lunch.

Our favorite accompaniment to quiche is a dark green salad tossed with some sort of zingy vinaigrette, but that’s just us.

YUM!

*I changed the cooking directions from the original suggestion.  Cooking a custard too fast will cause it to split - you’ll end up with what amounts to essentially scrambled eggs floating in a puddle of water.  Low and slow is the way to go with custards.  Your patience will be rewarded, Grasshopper…*

BBQ!

I was going to wait until summer to publish this post - barbecue really is a summertime dish, I think - but Doc went and started a conversation about barbecue over at his place, and I threatened to start a fight by posting my recipe. Never let it be said that Chili doesn’t put up when she speaks up, so here it is.

Depending on the source, I either get a lot of crap or a lot of praise for my homemade barbecue sauce. My immediate family - up to and including the Bowyer clan - loves it. Those outside of my circle aren’t as easy a sell, though. Barbecue sauce is one of those highly personal preferences, I think; if it’s not exactly what you think “good” barbecue sauce is, then it’s just not good. I like a lot of barbecue sauces - mostly from restaurants; the stuff in bottles always tastes like I imagine burned plastic would taste - but I really do think my sauce is at least as good as any of those slathered on restaurant ribs. Of course, I’m a little biased, so take my opinion for what it’s worth.

I made this recipe up ENTIRELY out of my head; there is no place to lay credit for this as an original or an inspiration. Here it is:

Take half a pound of hickory smoked bacon and cut it into small pieces (I don’t bother peeling the rashers away from each other; there’s no need for that kind of fussiness). Drop the pieces into the bowl of a food processor and blitz them until they form a paste. Scrape this into a medium-large sauce pan, then drop a medium-to-large, quartered yellow onion into the food processor and blitz that until it’s mush. Scrape the onion into the bacon, turn the heat to medium, and cook the whole mess, stirring occasionally, for about 10 minutes (and trust me, it’s a mess - at this point, the recipe really resembles nothing so much as a pot full of vomit. Were it not for the gorgeous smell of bacon and onions - two of my favorite things - I literally might not be able to make it past this step).

Once the bacon is cooked through (it won’t get brown - or, rather, it shouldn’t - but after ten minutes over medium heat, it should be sufficiently cooked), upend a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup into the pot and turn the heat down; it’s going to blop and burble all over your stove if you don’t. I usually use most of a standard size bottle (and I’m sorry, but all I have in my fridge at this moment is a “family size” bottle, so I don’t really know what the “standard” size is. Besides, I do all this by eye (and tongue), anyway, if you’ve not already guessed from my oh-so-precise measurements). Scoop in a few tablespoons of brown sugar (more or less, depending on your fancy), a shake or two of cayenne pepper (more or less, depending on your fancy) and a few tablespoons of mustard (again, more or less…) into the sauce. Stir it all together and let it simmer for about 10 minutes, then go back and taste it again, adjusting for sweetness or spice as you see fit.

That’s it!!

This stuff freezes beautifully. Because of all the vinegar in the ketchup, it never really gets ice-cube hard - it settles into a consistency not unlike fruit sorbet - so I find I can spoon out just what I need without having to defrost the whole batch. My most common use for this is “pulled chicken” sandwiches: I poach a few chicken breasts, shred the meat with forks, then stir it around in a little too much sauce and serve it in toasted bulky rolls with chips and (if I’ve got some) cole slaw.

YUM!