It seems we’ve moved past spring and gone right into summer. It was 72º on the river today. When you have days like that you need to pack the car and enjoy.
The cooler has ice extender tubes but also cubes in a ziplock. The sealed glass boxes are stacked on one side and then nestled up to the ice are cans of beer and soda.
When it’s lunch time you have a smorgasbord of goodies to spread out on a picnic table and enjoy.
Today’s quiche features cauliflower, carrots, kale, onion, and bell pepper, with a mix of monterey jack and parmesan cheese.
So, you are at home and out of harm’s way, good.
Now what’s for dinner? We came up with a new take on an old classic … Deep Dish Quiche.
By cooking it in an eight inch spring form pan, there is more room for the vegetables, cheese, and other fillings. Same amount of egg custard, just more of everything else. JQ never really liked the egg part anyway.
We’ve always used the Quiche Lorraine recipe out of Beard on Food(see attached). But we totally change out the fillings to suit whatever is in the fridge. This makes a perfect quarantine meal.
So the basic custard or crust ingredients are the same. However, it took about twice as long to bake … hey, it’s twice as thick!The results are a nice slice of dinner (or lunch) goodness.
Classic quiche uses bread dough, but this is a pastry shell and then fridge raid to fill.
Ingredients
Pastry Shell
2cupsAP flour
1/4tspsalt
1/4lbunsalted buttercut in small pieces at room temperature
1egg
1Tbsplemon juice
Filling
3egg yolks
2eggs
2/3cupheavy cream
1/2tspsalt
pinchpepper or more, if you like
1cupshredded cheesesome or all Parmesan, we like a mix of cheeses
1 to 2cupslightly steamed vegtables and / or cooked meat
Instructions
Preheat oven to 425º. LIghtly butter the bottom of an 8 inch spring form pan (Beard uses an 8 to 9 inch tart tin) and cover bottom with a round piece of parchment.
Pastry Shell
Place flour in a food processor and add butter, then pulse until butter is cut into flour. Whisk egg with lemon juice and add to processor. Run processor until a ball forms. You can add additional cold water if dough is too dry. Turn out onto lightly floured surface, form into a ball. Chill for 30 minutes.
Roll dough out between parchment sheets to about 1/8 inch thick and transfer to the spring form pan. Be careful not to stretch the dough as you form it to the sides of the pan. Crimp the top edge. Fit parchment to the inside of the pan and weigh it down with a couple cups of uncooked beans. This will keep the pie crust from puffing up. I also add a foil shield around the top of the shell crust to prevent it from browning too quickly.Bake at 425º for 18 minutes. Remove the beans and brush the inside of the shell with a thin coat of mustard. Return to oven and bake an additional 3 minutes. Allow to cool a bit before filling.
Egg Custard and Filling
Beat yolks and eggs along with cream, salt and pepper in a small bowl.
Chop and saute onion in skillet until soft. Add chopped vegetables and cook no more than two minutes. Place this mixture on the bottom of the shell.
If you are using cooked meat, add that to the shell.
Cover with grated cheese, then pour egg mixture to cover all of the ingredients. I like to top with a sprinkle of pepper.
Bake in a 375º oven for about 60 minutes or until a knife comes out clean. Near the end of bakiing (last 10 minutes), remove the foil shield to allow crust to brown. (If you are using a shallow tart/pie pan, cooking time is about 25 minutes.)
Berry Cobbler featuring a mix of tired blueberries and raspberries. WOW! This biscuit is great!
It is recommended you eat more fresh fruit and veggies as part of a defense against the virus. That is all well and good, but what is fresh about a stay-at-home scenario?
In these times, going to the grocery store has been reduced to a once in a month activity. This requires suiting up before you go, sanitizing along the way, and disinfecting upon return.
Perfect for breakfast, second breakfast and tea … okay, delicious anytime of the day.
The few remaining apples we got on the last supply run are starting to show their age. Grocery re-stock is a week off. So, I core, peel and slice the apples, cover with some sugar and cinnamon do a light saute and serve them with a biscuit.
These aren’t just any biscuits. These morsels came as part of a cobbler recipe. We’ve found that you don’t need berry cobbler to enjoy a really tasty treat. It’s kind of healthy … and they are delicious slathered with butter and jam.
Preheat oven to 375º and adjust rack to lower-middle.
Filling
Stir the sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, and salt together in a large bowl. Add the berries and mix gently with a rubber spatual until evenly coated; add the lemon zest and juice and mix to combine. Transfer the berry mixture to a 9- inch glass pie plate (8-inch square works too). Place on a rimmed baking sheet, and bake until the filling is hot and bubbling around the edges, about 25 minutes.
Biscuit
Whisk the flour, cornmeal, ¼ cup of sugar, baking powder, soda and salt in a large bowl to combine. Whisk the melted butter, buttermilk, and vanilla together in a small bowl. Mix the remaining 2 tsps sugar and cinnamon in a second small bowl and set aside. One minute before the berries come out of the oven, add the wet to dry ingredients; stir with a rubber spatula until just combined and no dry pockets remain.
Assemble and Bake
Remove the berries from the oven. Increase the temp. to 425º. Pinch off 8 equal pieces of biscuit dough and place them on top of the hot berry filling, spacing them at least ½ inches apart. Sprinkle each mound of dough with cinnamon sugar. Bake until the filling is bubbling and the biscuits are golden brown on top and cooked through, 15 to 18 minutes. Cool the cobbler on a wire rack for 20 minutes and serve.
If you don’t like peanut butter … well that’s just wrong … but also you won’t like this post much either.
We’ve long been fans of Alton Brown and “Good Eats” … even saw his stage show in PDX a few years ago.
Brown’s take on cooking and food is unique and always entertaining. Check out his YouTube channel.
As the days at home stretch out, you might be looking for a treat and this recipe has five ingredients, is quick, flourless and full of peanut goodness. Enjoy!
Preheat oven to 350º and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.
Cream peanut butter together with sugar(s) until fully incorporated.
Add egg, soda, vanilla, and salt. Beat until smooth.
With a 1 ½ Tbsp scoop (1 oz), measure and transfer balls of dough to cookie sheet. Leave 2 to 3 inches of space - that is 8 dough balls on each sheet.
With a fork press to flatten the balls and then slide the fork off, first in one direction and then 90º to those indents to create the classic cross hatch pattern.
Place both sheets roughly in center of oven and bake for 5 minutes. Turn the pans and bake an additional 5 minutes (10 minutes total).
Cool on sheets for 5 minutes and transfer to racks. Allow to cool completely before storing in cookie jar.
Notes
Here is the YouTube video with Alton making these cookies.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nalyEGpuSs&t=0s
Our baking experiments continue with these little guys. We tried three sizes and found we liked this small cupcake shape. The ratio between graham cracker crumb to cheese filling was great!
An early form of cheesecake was served to Olympians in 776 B.C. But it didn’t resemble what we now think of as cheesecake. Romans took the “recipe’ from the Greeks, made some changes, but all of these early forms of the dessert used a Ricotta-style cheese.
Immigrants brought it to America. In the late eighteen hundreds a Philadelphia Dairy man invented cream cheese which found its way into what is now commonly called the new york style cheesecake. This is what most think of when we say cheesecake.
It may not be cake, or pie, or a tart, but we can agree . . . it is a great dessert.
What’s for lunch gets packed into Ello© glass boxes and loaded into the cooler. Today we had chopped salad, grilled chicken, summer sausage, havarti cheese, crackers and chips, chocolate sandwich cookies, snicker bars and some fresh strawberries.
If you don’t like peanut butter … well that’s just wrong … but also you won’t like this post much either.
