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 #2: Never abandon someone in need.

In spite of a brief hiatus in the world of blogging, my wonderful husband has been helping cook even further. It was a long work week and I hurt my back, but he definitely gets the whole "Never abandon someone in need." At least, where I'm concerned.  He took care of two recipes at once: omelet and fried rice.

Omelets are really quite simple, so long as you don't overload them with ingredients. At least, that's what he tells me. The Tales crew always puts rice in their omelets, so he tried to do the same. He took brown rice, cooked and cooled in the refrigerator overnight and stir fried it in a little olive oil and soy sauce with salt, pepper, chopped carrots, and bell pepper. That was the fried rice part. He beat 2-3 eggs in a separate cup with herbs and spices that he liked (he tends to cook by smell; he did mention that he used Greek seasoning), and then fluffed the eggs with chopsticks and poured it over the whole thing and let it cook until it was firm on the bottom before trying to turn or fold it. He added cheese before it was done to make sure it was melted.

 

 Hm, could have sworn that picture was turned sideways when I uploaded it.... Oh well. And we were supposed to add tomatoes to it... the game would probably say we failed to cook it, but we leveled up, anyway. :-) One nice thing about this dish is that it's pretty cheap to make.