Success with Quiche

Hi, I'm Jen. Some of you already know me or have talked to me. I have my own food/traveling blog and JoDee invited me to join this one too, so here I am. I love cooking and baking, and trying food from other places I visit.

Ever since I visited Tartine Bakery in San Francisco last weekend and got a slice of their quiche, I have wanted to make a quiche of my own, better than any quiche I have made before. I wanted to make a really good quiche, so I turned to Deb at Smitten Kitchen because her recipes are excellent. For the custard filling and an idea of measurements to make the size of quiche I wanted, I took the example of a mushroom quiche she recently made, but added in less mushrooms and some of my own vegetables, and using pre-made crust.

Spring Quiche

Ingredients:

2 refrigerated pie crusts
10 ozs mushrooms (you can use a variety of kinds)
4 spears of asparagus
Half a zucchini
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 tsp dried thyme
3/4 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese (shred by hand, it'll melt in better that way)
6 eggs
2 cups milk (I used soy milk)
2 cups heavy whipping cream
Freshly grated nutmeg
Salt

Instructions:
 0. Preheat oven to 325.
1. In a 9 inch Springform pan, place the pre-made pie dough. You might want to coat the pan with a little olive oil before you put the crust in but I didn't and it didn't stick. Refrigerate for later.
2. Chop up vegetables and cook for 5 minutes in a frying pan with the olive oil. Add the butter, garlic and thyme and cook on medium for 10 more minutes.
3. Whip three eggs in a bowl. Then add 1 cup milk and 1 cup heavy whipping cream, plus some salt and a few grates of the nutmeg, and beat vigorously with a whisk until frothy, 5-10 minutes. This would be a lot easier with a kitchen aid but you don't need one.
4. Take out the pan from the fridge,  add 1/4 cup of the cheese, half the vegetable mixture, and the custard mixture. Repeat the custard mixture with remaining eggs/milk/salt/nutmeg, sprinkle another 1/4 cup cheese ontop of the first custard mixture, add in the rest of vegetables, and pour in the second batch of your custard mixture to fill the pan. Then sprinkle the last 1/4 cup of the cheese ontop of that and bake in the oven for an hour and a half or until a toothpick comes out clean.
5. Let cool on a wire rack or away from the stove for 15 minutes. Place on a baking sheet, unhinge the pan and remove the outer part of the pan to cut the first piece. It's easier to cut after you cut the first piece and you can put the pan back together after that.

It will be so nice to have this quiche for any meal of the day. Glad I decided to make it. :)

Mung Bean Noodle Thai Stirfry

 So one of my favorite healthy meals to make is Mung Bean Noodle Stir Fry. Mung beans are a low fat and low glycemic index noodle made from of course, mung beans. They are used in most Asian cultures and can be found at Asian grocery stores and sometimes on the Asian isle of normal grocery stores. Low in price, they do not require boiling in hot water to soften, and thus take less energy to prepare. They are pretty much tasteless, so it is required that the person preparing them understand basic flavoring to give these noodles substance.

So my 'Recipe' (it is hard to have recipes when you cook on the fly with what is at hand.)

3 chicken 'tenders(half a large breast), 1 package of mung bean noodles, half a bag of mung beans, 2 onions, 1 red pepper, 2 carrots, a handful of cilantro, 1 T vegetable oil, 4 T soy sauce, 1.5 T Fish Sauce, 1.5 T Rice wine vinegar, 1/2 a medium cabbage, 1/2 cup flour, 2 T cornstarch, T pepper and Salt, 3 cloves garlic, 1/2 cup chicken stock

Writing this down I am starting to realize that recipes I consider 'a breeze' are more complicated that I realize >.>

To start, open your mung bean noodles, and put them in a bowl and cover them with water and set aside, after 15-20 minutes, pour them into a colander and let the water stain off.

After this, you dry your chicken (thawed!) off, then mix the flour, cornstarch, pepper and salt together, and coat bite size piece of chicken in the mixture. Set a wok/large and deep frying pan up with the vegetable oil, and brown the chicken until it is about 90% cooked. Remove the chicken and place in a covered container/plate on the side.

Next you cut up your onions and red pepper and cook them down, then add the garlic and cabbage and chicken stock(which helps steam the cabbage) and cook until the chicken stock has mostly cooked down and the cabbage is starting to wilt down. Now it is time to add your noodles and mung beans, then once you have them stirred with the vegetable, add your sauces (fish, soy and rice vinegar), and re add the chicken (it will have finished cooking because of its own steam if you had it covered, and if you cooked it all the way before hand it is going to be dry and chewy) and then cook for another 3-5 minutes on medium heat to get all that flavor soak in.

Now all that is left is putting the food on a plate, and adding finely chopped raw carrots and fresh cilantro to the top.

This meal has a very heavy 'health' flavor to it. The carrots add crunch and there is a plethora of textures and flavors from all the veggies. You can easily make this vegetarian as well by deleting the fish sauce (:(), and chicken and substituting mushroom/vegetable broth.

Oh yes and on a final note, the drink in the top picture is one of toms and my favorites. It is a sour blue raspberry soda. You take about 1.5 ounces of Rosas cocktail mix blue raspberry, a few small squirts of raspberry agave nectar(to sweeten!), a few drops of lemon, and top with soda water and you get a first class sour blue raspberry soda.

Oven Roasted Mini Peppers

Bought a bag of these Mini-Sweet peppers. Having no real plans for them, but not wanting them to go to waste in my fridge and mold. I scoured the internet for a good recipe.

I am not a fan of overly complicated dishes, or using too many expensive ingredients. What if the dish comes out bad? What if I do not have the talents to execute the proper steps to make top dollar peppers! The horrors of my over active imagination.


So instead of risking them to a recipe I did not have at hand, and instead of wasting time cooking all night. I continued reading my current book and instead, cut off the ends and cleaned them out. Arranged them haphazardly on a tray. Gave them a spray of butter (because butter is the only flavor of canned oil I have right now, Olive oil would have been better) and then dusted them with garlic salt.

Instead of making an elegant meal to serve them with, I ordered a few pizzas from Dominos(who happened to be having a 5.99 for medium two topping pizzas deal). and placed these on top of them. Dinner.

P.S. I don't take the skins off, I happen to like the flavor/texture the skin provides.