Quiche a la Julia Child

In matters of eggs and custard-y things, I defer to Julia Child. I don't even try to mess around.

Ok, that's not true.

I defer to Julia Child on egg-to-milk proportions. But I do mess around with everything else.

For instance, I don't think Julia Child would ever tell you to use a storebought crust, but seriously, if I have to make the crust, I'd rather just not make quiche. I tried making it without the crust, but Neil revolted. And I don't like making crusts because it adds a good 40 minutes to prep time, and why do that, I say, when crusts are on sale at the grocery store for $1.50 a pair?

So buy a crust.

And these too:

3 "large" eggs

Cream (says Julia)/Milk (says I)

Meat (crispy bacon, sliced ham, turkey, etc.)

Salt

Pepper

Onions

Cheese (Swiss is sort of the accepted quiche cheese because of its propensity to not make everything really wet, but Neil likes the taste of Cheddar better)

Parsley, oregano, basil, chives

Other things in the fridge that need to be eaten (last time I grated in some carrots)

**If you want spinach quiche, blend in 1 c. cooked spinach into the custard.

Ok, so I just realized that the Julia Child version only calls for eggs, cream, bacon, salt, pepper, and nutmeg, so this really isn't quiche according to Julia Child, it's messed-up-Julia-based-quiche. But I still think it's good.

Here's what's important when making quiche:

"Any quiche can be made with either heavy or light cream or with milk. The proportions are always 1 egg in a measuring cup plus milk or cream to the 1/2 cup level; 2 eggs and milk or cream to the 1-cup level; 3 eggs and milk or cream to the 1 1/2 cup level; and so forth."

--Julia Child

I prefer to use milk because a) cream is expensive and b) cream is fattening. I'm sure it tastes delicious, however, but I'll go on in my skim-milk ignorance, so please don't tell me if you use cream and it's just out of this world.

Ok, the actual makings:

Step 1:

Preheat oven to 450.

Step 2:

Arrange pie crust in dish, put in either pie weights or dried beans/rice to prevent crust from puffing up (a Julia trick), and bake for 10-15 minutes. The crust should be set but still soft. now turn your oven down to 375.

Step 3:

Grate your cheese, slice your onions, and cut up your meat things. Put in however much you feel like putting in. I usually put in half to three-quarters of an onion, a couple of ounces of chopped meat, and enough grated cheese so that it covers the onion and meat but doesn't obscure them completely from sight. I think the Julia rule is 2 T. (which doesn't seem like much. I definitely do more). Dump all your cut-up things into the bottom of the shell.

Step 4:

Mix up your custard. I usually go for the 3 eggs variant and then end up adding another egg and another slog of milk. It depends on how big your pie dish is and how much "good stuff" you already put in. I then add about a teaspoon each of parsley, basil, chives, and oregano, with about a half teaspoon of salt and a couple grinds of pepper.

Step 5:

Pour the custard over the yummy things already in the pie crust.

Step 6:

Bake at 375 for 30-35 minutes. The quiche is done when it's puffed up and brown (it should not jiggle wildly when you take it out of the oven. That is egg soup and it's nasty, so put it back in the oven until it turns into quiche.)

We like to eat our quiche warm or cold as either breakfast or lunch, depending on how early I got up that day to make it. Yum.

Curried Pumpkin Soup

**no soup picture because ravenous family devoured it too fast

I made this recipe a couple of weeks ago with some of the leftover canned pumpkin filling my pantry. It was pretty hurried, and I was a bit unsure of how it would turn out, since I was smashing together several different recipes and adding in my own ideas.

So I was watching anxiously when Neil took his first bite. He rolled the soup around in his mouth. His eyes widened, and he started gulping that soup down.

We both decided it was a winner. Oh yum. I'm looking at the pumpkin-besmeared scrap of paper I jotted my measurements down on and getting hungry all over again.

The nice thing about this soup is that it requires very little time both in preparation and in cooking. You're only chopping one thing! (or two if you don't buy pre-minced garlic, which I highly recommend).

Anyway, here's what you'll need:

1 onion, chopped
1/4 c. butter

3 t. minced garlic

4 c. milk

3 t. chicken bouillion

1 15oz can pumpkin

1 t. curry

1 t. salt

1-2 bay leaves

Heat the butter over medium high heat until it's melted. Just as it starts to sizzle and pop, add the garlic and bay leaves for 30 seconds, then add the onions and cook 3-4 minutes. Add remaining ingredients.

Simmer for 15-20 minutes. Puree the soup (an immersion blender works really well for this! It's a nifty little gadget that I dearly love).

Dad's molasses cookies

Do you like cookies?



We sure do.



These are my absolute favorites: my dad's molasses cookies. Oh...they're just good. So good.


Molasses Cookies

½ c. oil
1 cup sugar
¼ cup molasses
1 egg
2 cup flour (I like whole wheat best)
1 tsp soda
½ tsp cloves
½ tsp ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp salt

Mix oil, sugar, molasses, egg. Add dry ingredients. Roll into balls and roll in cinnamon sugar. Bake 8 minutes at 375 degrees.

Take them off the pans right away and transfer to a cooling rack to preserve the deliciously chewy-ness of these cookies!!

Savory Lentil Soup

About six months ago, I tried a recipe from Martha Stewart Living for French lentil soup. I don't know what happened, but it was horrendous. We ate a bowl each, and then froze the rest to eat later. Neil started referring to it as "that nasty stuff" for the duration of its freezer life, as in "I know you had a really crazy day today--why don't you just defrost that nasty stuff for dinner?"

This is much, much better. It's based on my mom's recipe for lentil soup, but it has a few variations (I try not to post anything on here that you could find in another cookbook or something, because then why bother reading this blog? This is only my made-up or adapted recipes).

Here's what you'll need:

One 16-oz bag green lentils
Large onion
Two or three carrots, peeled and chopped
Three or four stalks of celery, diced
1 1/2 t. ground cumin
Olive oil
1 t. Salt
1/4 to 1/2 t. ground red pepper
Chicken broth or bouillion (enough for about 7 cups of water)
3 cloves garlic, minced
Sausage, if desired

Heat the olive oil in a large pot. When it's hot, dump in the garlic and the cumin and let them saute for about thirty seconds, then add the onion. Cook the onion for about three minutes until it begins to soften, then add the carrots and celery and cook for another two minutes.

Add chicken broth (I use bouillion and 7 c. water because I'm cheap; if you use chicken broth I would use about 4 cups of broth and 3 of water), then stir in the lentils. Add salt and a couple of shakes of red pepper (depending on how much spice you like).

Bring it back up to a boil, then turn down to simmer for about half an hour. I like to stop the simmering process before the lentils turn into mush--I prefer them soft, but still retaining their individual shapes.

If you want to add sausage, add it at the end. I prefer to use kielbasa or smoked sausage because it retains its shape and can be microwaved rather than requiring another pot. DO NOT add the sausage at the beginning--it will taste all woody and lentily and not like sausage at all. Just chop it up and microwave it.

I am particularly fond of the smoked sausage breakfast links for this--they are very small and nicely compact. I use about 5 oz, chopped in small pieces.

And if you do not have cumin, which you should, because it's very good and very important, then I suggest that rather than buying it at the grocery store you seek out an ethnic foods store, because they will probably sell it in very cheap packets where it's like 99 cents for a huge bag instead of being $4 an ounce at the grocery store. In fact, I highly recommend that you check your ethnic foods store for all the spices you use regularly--I think you'll be surprised.

For instance, at the one I frequent (down by the WL library parking garage, for you locals!), I can buy a big packet of nutmeg for less than a dollar. Love it!

Just make sure you save random containers, so that you have containers in your pantry instead of baggies. This is what my "cool spices" shelf of my spice cupboard looks like. Super attractive, eh?

Make-a-Meal-Out-of-It Spaghetti

I don't know about you, but I really like spaghetti. For instance, I used to ask for it on my birthday. And when we did "spotlight books" in Primary, they glued dried strands of spaghetti in mine on the "favorite foods" page. In fact, I like spaghetti so much that I secretly ate all the dried pieces of spaghetti after carefully peeling them off the glue.

Now, you don't have to be a spaghetti fiend like I am to like this recipe, but my gripe with spaghetti is that it seems to be a last-minute "I'm really tired and it's late...let's just have spaghetti" kind of dish. So you get out your canned sauce (which if you're cheap like I am probably isn't anything too special, and it's full of preservatives, which I personally have no problem with but I'll complain about to strengthen my case, even though I like my food to last until I want to eat it) and you dump some spaghetti in some water and in ten minutes you have dinner. It sort of fills you up, but hey, at least you ate something.

Those noodles deserve something more. They deserve a real sauce that requires a bit of chewing. And they also deserve a bit more healthiness themselves, so give whole wheat spaghetti a try. I think you'll be surprised at how yummy it is.

This isn't a dish that I typically buy special ingredients for--I just use what I have on hand. Of course, it also depends what you typically have kicking around. I'm fortunate enough to have most of what I need growing in my garden, so you may need to add a few items to your shopping list.

Here's the lineup:


Whole wheat spaghetti noodles, mushrooms, green pepper, carrots, celery, onions, garlic (I buy the pre-minced kind), fresh roma tomatoes (you could probably use canned diced tomatoes without losing much flavor), sun-dried tomatoes, a can of tomato sauce or tomato paste (depending on how thick you like your sauce) extra virgin olive oil, salt and freshly ground pepper, red pepper flakes, parsley, oregano, and rosemary. I'm not giving measurements because this is really a to-taste thing and also depends on ingredient quantities and the number of people you're cooking for. Sorry, you'll just have to eyeball it!

Start off with everything chopped--it'll take a bit, but this cooks pretty quickly once you get going.

Before you begin chopping, you'll need to reconstitute your sun-dried tomatoes if they're fully dried (if they're oil-packed, you can just go ahead and chop them up).

Put your tomatoes in a small bowl, just barely cover them with very hot water, put a lid on the bowl, and let them sit for about twenty minutes. Save the water afterwards to add to your sauce later.

When you're about five minutes from the end of your chopping, start a pot of salted water boiling (the salt will help it to boil faster). As soon as it reaches its boiling pot, drop in your spaghetti (make sure you stir it so the noodles don't stick together. Adding a few drops of olive oil will also prevent sticking). Set a timer on your pasta.

Heat a nonstick skillet over medium high heat and add some olive oil. As soon as the skillet's hot enough that the olive oil glides easily over the pan when you pick it up and turn it, throw in your garlic and a couple of pinches of red pepper flakes. Neil likes lots of garlic, so I put in four or five teaspoons.

Let that cook for about thirty seconds, stirring frequently to prevent scorching, then add about a teaspoon each of rosemary and oregano (and parsley if you want it). Give it another fifteen seconds, then throw in your salt and pepper.

After another fifteen seconds, add your onions. Cook them for about three minutes until they're starting to turn a bit translucent, then add the mushrooms and cook for two minutes, then add the peppers and cook those for a couple of minutes. Typically you'd cook all of these for much longer to reach a fullness of flavor, but I'm kind of still in the spaghetti-hurry mode, so it's your call.

Add the carrots and celery and let the whole pile cook for another minute or two, then add in your sun-dried tomato soaking liquid. If you didn't do sun-dried tomatoes, just move ahead. In any case, let everything boil for a bit to get some of the water out with the flavor left behind, then add in the chopped tomatoes and chopped sun-dried tomatoes. Give it a minute or two, then add in your tomato sauce or paste, plus water to get it to your desired sauce consistency.

And voila! You have a nice hearty sauce. Now drain your pasta and mix the two up together and eat your dinner, feeling virtuous about your whole-wheat pasta and all those yummy veggies you're consuming.

Pesto-mozzarella-tomato grilled deliciousness

There's this really cool little restaurant a couple of miles from our house called Baja Peninsula. It's sort of a California cuisine-type place (at least, that's what they say. I didn't know California had its own cuisine, but whatever it is, it's good).





A couple months back, my parents took us to lunch there and my dad ordered a sandwich that was the genesis of this one.





A disclaimer before I begin: I'm no Pioneer Woman, who has the most mouth-wateringly delectable food blog ever, but there are some pretty good eats 'round here, and I really love cooking, so the idea of a food blog is fun. Maybe I'll even graduate to step by step pictures, but for now, since this is a posting-after-making-due-to-requests, I have only a picture of the end product.

So here's what you need:

• Homemade pesto (scroll down for the recipe)
• Hearty bread that will stand up to being grilled--I like to use sourdough or rye. Panera makes a fabulous sourdough, Wal-mart's California Sourdough isn't too bad, or I've listed a downright tasty rye recipe...keep scrolling.
• Mozzarella cheese (fresh is best, but the other stuff is still delicious. I've even used string cheese in a pinch)
• Fresh tomatoes, preferably beefsteak, and preferably straight from the garden
• Butter, or your hydrogenated oil spread of choice
• Skillet or griddle

Step 1:

Turn your cooking implement of choice to whatever temperature your stove does best for grilled cheese. We have a countertop electric griddle that is just lovely for this; it's an excellent purchase if you've got some money to throw around in the kitchen.

Step 2:

While that's heating up, butter one side of each piece of bread, slice a nice little pile of cheese, and slice up your tomato. Shoot for slices that are about a quarter-inch thick, and don't skimp on the butter. You don't want anything to burn.

Step 3:

Turn each pair of slices butter-side-in, so they're oozing butter on each other rather than on your clean counter or plate or whatever. Spread pesto on the top non-buttered side of each pair of slices.

Step 4:

When your surface is nicely heated, place one of the slides on it buttered-side-down and quickly assemble the rest of the sandwich. Neil prefers to have the pesto next to the tomatoes, I don't really care one way or the other. In any case, you should have one layer of cheese and a layer of tomato.

Step 5:

Grill to whatever doneness you prefer (just please let the cheese melt!), slice in half for easy consumption, and let this baby slide down your throat (which it will, due to your refusal to skimp on butter, right?). Sooo good.

Rye bread

4 to 4 1/2 c. flour
1 pkg active dry yeast
2 c. warm water (120 to 130 F)
1/4 c. packed brown sugar
2 T cooking oil
1 1/2 t. salt
1 1/2 c. rye flour
1 T. caraway seeds
cornmeal
milk

Mix 3 c. flour and the yeast; add warm water, brown sugar, oil, and salt. Beat with an electric mixer on a low speed for about 30 seconds until roughly blended, then beat on high for 3 min. Stir in caraway, rye, and as much flour as the dough will take.

Sprinkle flour on a flat surface, then turn out the dough and knead for 6-8 minutes. This is where you'll want to smoosh in the rest of your flour that you didn't use previously. When you've finished, leave the floury mess out on your surface; you'll use it again later.

Plop your dough into a lightly greased bowl (I use shortening on a paper towel) and then flip it over so the greased side is up. Cover and let it rise until it's doubled (about an hour).

Punch the dough down, divide it in half, and turn it out onto aforesaid floury mess surface. Cover and let it rest for 10 minutes. While it's "resting," lightly grease a baking sheet and sprinkle it liberally with cornmeal.

Shape each half of dough into a ball and place on the cookie sheet. Cover again and let rise AGAIN until doubled (30-45 min).

Brush the top of each loaf with milk. Bake at 375 for about 30-35 minutes. Immediately remove from baking sheet and cool on a wire rack.

Homemade Pesto

1/4 c. olive oil (or cooking oil)
1/2 c. chopped nuts (walnut, almonds, or pine nuts)
2 c. firmly packed fresh basil leaves
1/2 c. grated Parmesan or Romano cheese
4 cloves garlic, peeled and quartered
1/4 t. salt
black pepper

If using a food processor, combine oil, nuts, basil, cheese, garlic, pepper and salt, processing until nearly smooth. If you're using a blender, it will be easiest to first chop the basil and nuts before adding them to the mixture.

See? It's that easy.

I like to make a huge batch and freeze individual portions. Pesto's optimal life in the freezer is 3 months.