One Sec...
Look, Ma, I'm sophisticated! -- Leek Quiche
The following is a public service announcement. Asking the one person in the house who is not allowed to eat sugar to supervise the baking of chocolate chip cookies is not a smart idea if you want to live to see sixteen. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
At any rate. This week's recipe was Leek Quiche, from The Frugal Gourmet.
I have an on-again, off-again relationship with the Frugal Gourmet. Heaven knows his cookbooks make entertaining reading, but his history is sometimes a little suspect. The cultural authenticity of his dishes can be questionable. His definition of "frugal" does not coincide with mine, possibly because he lived in a place famous for its seafood, whereas I am stuck inland where shrimp is $9.00 a pound and "local fishmonger" is a phrase the natives are not familiar with.
However, I do enjoy playing around with his more basic dishes. My whole family has a love affair with leeks and cheese. Leek quiche seemed like a match made in heaven, or at least at the kitchen counter.
First of all, I could ask for the sense I was born with and experiment with leek quiche, not with pie crust. I have made good pie crust ever since I was old enough to hold a pastry cutter using the Betty Crocker recipe. Yummy, flaky, tender pie crust. The Frugal Gourmet's recipe, however, was much easier, and swore it would be tender. I figured I'd take a flyer on it. Easier is better, after all.
Whoa, Betsy. I make my pie crust with whole wheat pastry flour, which tends to make it more fragile, but this was ridiculous. The pie crust crumbled like a badly laid fresco, and refused to roll any thinner than half an inch without splitting into more factions than the Democrats. This probably means that I'll never make it again, but I was willing to go with it at least long enough to find out if it was any good. I pulled out my extremely high-tech pie weights (that's dry soybeans, to you -- I keep a jarful in the cupboard) and toss the whole business into the oven with a surreptitious curse. I love eating pie crust, but making it? Not so much.
The Frugal Gourmet, in a fit of true frugality, recommended plain old Swiss cheese. Swiss cheese from the Anonymouse Cheese Section, please, Mr. Cheesemonger. Now all I had to do was grate it. As I was making a double batch -- the chances of getting seven people, including two Bottomless Pits, into one pie are so small as to be laughable -- I had to grate double the cheese.
I hate grating cheese almost as much as I hate washing lettuce. I'll do it if I have to, but if I've learned one thing from being married to a specialist in management, it's this: delegate, delegate, delegate. That explains why I was willing to endure the extensive griping as I snared one of the Bottomless Pits and extorted a little work out of him. Rough on the ears, sure, but it sure beat courting carpal tunnel in the name of dinner.
Meanwhile, I snared the other Bottomless Pit, handed him a spoon, and introduced him to cooking the same way I did for my own children. "Here. This is a frying pan. This is butter, these are leeks, this is a spoon. Put it all together and stir." I like to get them started on the heavily technical end of things as quickly as possible. I hope he's appropriately grateful that, while I taught him to wash leeks, I didn't stick him with the job of chopping them. Leeks aren't as weepy as onions, but they can still bring a sentimental tear to your eye.
One of the nice parts about quiche is that it's not as though you have to do anything particularly complicated once you have the pie crust made. Dump in the savories, dump in the egg/milk/cheese mixture, dump in the oven. Dump gently, of course, unless you have a self-cleaning oven, but dump nonetheless.
I'll tell you this much: leek quiche smells mighty good when it bakes. When it came out, with its rather precious garnish of three blanched leeks spread out on the top of the pies, it looked good, too. I beat off the hordes and set a timer; she who cuts quiche too soon must serve it with a spoon.
Turns out that she who waits the prescribed fifteen minutes serves it with a spoon anyway. The quiche flowed all over the pie pan. Kilauea is less enthusiastic. Perhaps another ten minutes of baking?
Biting into the crust proved unrewarding. Apparently a crust made with good old artery-clogging shortening is the way to go after all. Considering the flaming nuisance this crust was to roll out, that's looking like the easier alternative anyway.
The filling, however. Ah, the filling was sublime. I'm always a little suspicious of recipes involving Swiss cheese, since plain Swiss cheese isn't, in my opinion, worth eating, but it was mild and deliciously leek-y. It didn't take long before the group was well into the second pie, although the consensus was made clear by the fact that after the first few slices, the pie server was abandoned. Instead, we used a spoon to scoop out the filling and leave the crust behind.
Even the second Bottomless Pit, a picky eater if there ever was one, agreed to try the small dish of leek-free quiche I'd made for him, and pronounced it delicious. I'll be experimenting with this one again. It tastes too good to be abandoned. Fixing the crust is easy, of course, but the real question is, can I persuade the filling to solidify? I'll bet I can, and I'll be one popular Mama if I do, too.
At any rate. This week's recipe was Leek Quiche, from The Frugal Gourmet.
I have an on-again, off-again relationship with the Frugal Gourmet. Heaven knows his cookbooks make entertaining reading, but his history is sometimes a little suspect. The cultural authenticity of his dishes can be questionable. His definition of "frugal" does not coincide with mine, possibly because he lived in a place famous for its seafood, whereas I am stuck inland where shrimp is $9.00 a pound and "local fishmonger" is a phrase the natives are not familiar with.
However, I do enjoy playing around with his more basic dishes. My whole family has a love affair with leeks and cheese. Leek quiche seemed like a match made in heaven, or at least at the kitchen counter.
First of all, I could ask for the sense I was born with and experiment with leek quiche, not with pie crust. I have made good pie crust ever since I was old enough to hold a pastry cutter using the Betty Crocker recipe. Yummy, flaky, tender pie crust. The Frugal Gourmet's recipe, however, was much easier, and swore it would be tender. I figured I'd take a flyer on it. Easier is better, after all.
Whoa, Betsy. I make my pie crust with whole wheat pastry flour, which tends to make it more fragile, but this was ridiculous. The pie crust crumbled like a badly laid fresco, and refused to roll any thinner than half an inch without splitting into more factions than the Democrats. This probably means that I'll never make it again, but I was willing to go with it at least long enough to find out if it was any good. I pulled out my extremely high-tech pie weights (that's dry soybeans, to you -- I keep a jarful in the cupboard) and toss the whole business into the oven with a surreptitious curse. I love eating pie crust, but making it? Not so much.
The Frugal Gourmet, in a fit of true frugality, recommended plain old Swiss cheese. Swiss cheese from the Anonymouse Cheese Section, please, Mr. Cheesemonger. Now all I had to do was grate it. As I was making a double batch -- the chances of getting seven people, including two Bottomless Pits, into one pie are so small as to be laughable -- I had to grate double the cheese.
I hate grating cheese almost as much as I hate washing lettuce. I'll do it if I have to, but if I've learned one thing from being married to a specialist in management, it's this: delegate, delegate, delegate. That explains why I was willing to endure the extensive griping as I snared one of the Bottomless Pits and extorted a little work out of him. Rough on the ears, sure, but it sure beat courting carpal tunnel in the name of dinner.
Meanwhile, I snared the other Bottomless Pit, handed him a spoon, and introduced him to cooking the same way I did for my own children. "Here. This is a frying pan. This is butter, these are leeks, this is a spoon. Put it all together and stir." I like to get them started on the heavily technical end of things as quickly as possible. I hope he's appropriately grateful that, while I taught him to wash leeks, I didn't stick him with the job of chopping them. Leeks aren't as weepy as onions, but they can still bring a sentimental tear to your eye.
One of the nice parts about quiche is that it's not as though you have to do anything particularly complicated once you have the pie crust made. Dump in the savories, dump in the egg/milk/cheese mixture, dump in the oven. Dump gently, of course, unless you have a self-cleaning oven, but dump nonetheless.
I'll tell you this much: leek quiche smells mighty good when it bakes. When it came out, with its rather precious garnish of three blanched leeks spread out on the top of the pies, it looked good, too. I beat off the hordes and set a timer; she who cuts quiche too soon must serve it with a spoon.
Turns out that she who waits the prescribed fifteen minutes serves it with a spoon anyway. The quiche flowed all over the pie pan. Kilauea is less enthusiastic. Perhaps another ten minutes of baking?
Biting into the crust proved unrewarding. Apparently a crust made with good old artery-clogging shortening is the way to go after all. Considering the flaming nuisance this crust was to roll out, that's looking like the easier alternative anyway.
The filling, however. Ah, the filling was sublime. I'm always a little suspicious of recipes involving Swiss cheese, since plain Swiss cheese isn't, in my opinion, worth eating, but it was mild and deliciously leek-y. It didn't take long before the group was well into the second pie, although the consensus was made clear by the fact that after the first few slices, the pie server was abandoned. Instead, we used a spoon to scoop out the filling and leave the crust behind.
Even the second Bottomless Pit, a picky eater if there ever was one, agreed to try the small dish of leek-free quiche I'd made for him, and pronounced it delicious. I'll be experimenting with this one again. It tastes too good to be abandoned. Fixing the crust is easy, of course, but the real question is, can I persuade the filling to solidify? I'll bet I can, and I'll be one popular Mama if I do, too.
JULIA CHILD. I'll repeat that very slowly. JULIA CHILD. She absolutely adored quiche, and nobody, but nobody, could explain things like Julia. I don't have the book in Japan (because I'm a moron, since you ask), but I am willing to bet you that The Way To Cook not only has quiche recipes and discussion, but also has troubleshooting tips, such as "how to be sure your quiche is going to set firmly enough but not hard as rubber."
On the subject of pie crust, a butter crust really is tastier, but you know who you should learn how to make it from? Why, Julia Child, of course!
If you want a truly spectacular recipe, though, you have to check out Rose Levy Birnbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible. Check out, like get from a library. It's a beast! Read everything, and just once, just once, do it exactly, line by line, second by second, the way she tells you to. She's a total nut, but everything works perfectly, every time. And in addition to savory butter crusts and stuff, she has this one crust she invented that has cheddar cheese and a pinch of cayenne, and is so light and flaky, and toasty-cheesy-tasty, you just can't believe it. And with a yummy quiche filling (she has some suggestions), it is bar none the best quiche I have ever eaten. No question.
Joe Bob says check it out.
I did try the whole business again, with my own crust and an extended cooking time, and it was pretty good, but not as leek-y as the first time. More experimentation is clearly needed (and is probably going to be tasty), so research is good.