Quiche-y

I give up on using the Dwarven Vows for titles. It was one of those ideas that sounds great until you actually implement it, and then, it looks cheesy. Or maybe kitschy. Like quiche-y? 

Anyway, so I'm behind in my blogging (not that it really makes any difference in the long run, whatsoever), which means that I have several recipes to report. First, the quiche: It was one of those "make it up as you go along" kind of Saturday mornings, and it was begun with the greatest of intentions without realizing that three eggs are really not enough for a deep-dish pie crust. Oops.

Fortunately, there's a grocery store around the corner, and my quiche turned out to be what my husband referred to as something along the lines of "best I'd made." Quiche is one of those easy-ish delicacies that everyone can put their own spin on, but there are some basic ingredients it must have, IMHO, including eggs, cheese, and crust (unless you're going low-carb, in which case the crust is unnecessary). In any case, here's what I did:

Ingredients:
1 deep-dish pie crust 
3 eggs
about 1/4 cup milk
handful of shredded cheese
about 1/2 cup frozen spinach (preferably thawed)
4 slices of bacon, cooked and crumbled up
3 more eggs
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pat of butter
4 button mushrooms
more cheese (I probably used about a cup to a cup and a half of cheese in the entire thing.)

Directions:
1. Poke holes in the crust using a fork and bake in the oven until the crust is a light golden brown. (For my oven, it was about as long as it took to preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.)
2. Beat three eggs in a bowl. Add milk to mixture. (You can skip this, I think, but it does make the eggy mixture go further.) Dump in spinach and cooked bacon. Mix together. Pour into pie shell and realize that the shell is only half-full.....
3. Turn off the oven, and run to the store to pick up a new carton of eggs. :-/ Come back, turn the oven back on, cut up mushrooms, and cook them a la Julia Child -- fry a pat of butter in olive oil, and then cook the mushrooms over medium-low heat until they brown. Don't crowd the mushrooms if you want them to brown. Yummy -- real butter AND olive oil!
4. Mix together three beaten eggs, cooked mushrooms, and a small handful of cheese and pour in a second layer over the spinach-bacon-egg mixture. Of course, you don't have to layer your quiche, as I'm sure that you, dear reader, were better prepared than I! :-)
5. Sprinkle cheese on top.
6. Bake the quiche in the oven at 400 degrees F until the egg mixture sets. I think it was roughly half an hour, but if you're unfamiliar with quiche recipes, you probably want to check after twenty minutes and then every ten minutes after that. About the time that your kitchen starts to smell delicious with cheesy goodness is about the time you'll probably need to watch it more closely.
7. The most important step: ENJOY YOUR QUICHE.

Cutting the quiche

The first piece!

If only I could mess up more recipes and have them still turn out with quiche-y goodness! In any case, I guess "being prepared" is the lesson to be learned here. Also, after you've cooked a dish a couple times and looked at several recipes, ranging from your grandmother to Paula Deen to allrecipes.com, you can kind of wing it and come up with something that's pretty good. :-) So....necessity is the mother of invention, and practice makes perfect, and, um.... a penny saved is a penny earned and all you need is love. And stuff.

Dwarven Vow #1: Let's all work together for a peaceful world.

In the spirit of working together -- and producing a palatable product on a day where I worked two four-hour shifts at two different jobs in retail for the third day in a row-- my husband put his Polish (well, quarter-Polish) hands to work making stuffed cabbage. Yeah, so we definitely went with the default recipe without adding the Tales-inspired ingredient cheese. Sorry, Genis. Your cooking ideas were odd, and practice makes permanent. We did add the mushrooms, though.

Here's the family recipe we used:

1 head of cabbage (boiled whole)
1 lb. hamburger meat
1-2 cups rice
2-3 slices of bacon, fried and chopped up finely (oops, forgot this one)
a few mushrooms, cut up and sauteed (Tales-inspired ingredient not found in the original recipe) 
2 cans tomato soup

1. Boil the cabbage until it is boiled through. This will take a long time.
2. Cook rice according to package instructions. 
3. Sautee mushrooms in a little butter while rice is finishing up.
4. Cook bacon, then cut it up finely. (Traditionally, you're supposed to use salt pork, but bacon is what we have at my house.)
5. Mix together bacon (including fat that cooked out of it), hot rice, mushrooms, and beef. The heat from the rice, plus the time spent baking in the crockpot should cook it through. If you're squeamish, though, go ahead and cook the hamburger meat at least partway in the bacon fat and mushrooms.
6. Peel off cabbage leaves carefully. The first couple will probably fall to pieces, but you should have a relatively sturdy, pliable leaf soon enough. Spoon filling into a cabbage leaf, and then fold the leaf around the filling carefully. Place folded-side down in the crockpot or slow cooker.

7. Be sure to get a full layer on the bottom of the crockpot, and then pour one can of tomato soup over the stuffed cabbage. Then, you can use any weak or easily torn leaves as a layer before putting in the next layer of stuffed cabbage leaves. The better the cabbage and/or the better job you did boiling your cabbage, the fewer leaves you will have that fall apart.
8. Top the whole thing with the second can of tomato soup, and then cook in the crockpot. If you use the low setting, it'll take 6-8 hours. If you cook it on high, it'll take about 3 hours. Sure, it's labor-intensive, but it's good and relatively cheap meal.

9. If you want to top it a la Tales of Symphonia, sprinkle cheese on top, but when I mentioned this to my husband, he looked horrified. I think it would be good, but, then again, I forgot to add it to mine. Guess I'll have to try to remember the cheese with the leftovers sitting in my fridge. :-) They do reheat well!

The trick to good stuffed cabbage (AKA cabbage rolls) is a good cabbage. I apparently do not have a discerning enough eye to pick a good cabbage. Either that, or we over-boiled the leaves. In any case, the leaves weren't strong or sturdy enough to really wrap around the filling.

Oh well, at least stuffed cabbage has the time-honored family tradition of being hard to mess up if you follow directions, it reheats well, and OH MY GOSH it makes a lot of food. For the two of us, at least. Two or three rolls are enough for a pretty substantial meal for me and my short, mid-twenties self. If only life were so simple, you know? Then again, if life could be lived by a formula beyond love God, love others, and take care of business, it'd be a lot less interesting. It probably wouldn't have very many good stories for the video games. :-)