Linden's quiches, crusty or crustless

Good try, Xan, but you're going to have to wake up earlier than that to fool me! I've watched Ratatouille and No Reservations, so I think I know what happens in a proper chef's kitchen.

A proper chef's kitchen.

Of course these, days, it's just me cooking so I can't put any of that into practice. I know, you're thinking, "maybe she needs a pet!" but we have one, and far from helping me cook, he steals my food. One time, I put a scone out on my desk and went to make tea, and by the time I had, the cat had snuck into my room, a No Cat Zone, and jumped up on my desk and stolen my scone! I caught him walking out of my room with the whole thing hanging out of his mouth. So I'm not taking the risk of a pet, and I'll just keep cooking on my own for a little while longer.

But before I start all my cooking for the day I'm going to try and work through some of my backlog. This one is about quiche, which I know people don't really like for a variety of reasons, but I do, and it is super easy to make, so it happens a lot here.

Alas, the most delicious quiches involve bacon, which is solidly in the no-eat-zone, and while I can justify a little bit of it occassionally, I can't excuse a whole week of constant baconing (it's the nitrates, you can't trust them).

So instead, broccoli, which is much healthier, and vegetablarianer, than bacon. Swap in skim milk for the cream, add lots of cheddar to that, and delicious whole-wheat pie crust and you have a super-delicious weekful of lunches.

Plus, with the leftover pie crust, you can make proper pie! (Mm, look at all that rustic whole-wheat pie crust. (Don't be fooled by it's slightly darker color, that is not overcooking but wheaty goodness!))

If you are feeling lazy, you can leave out the pie crust entirely, and just have the delicious eggy cheesy bit. (This was a more recent go, the result of my lazy weeknightness and a leftover head of broccoli that wanted eating.

Linden's Quiche

I have been fixin to make a quiche for a long time - weeks, in fact. Bacon was on sale at the grocery story a few weeks ago, and I bought a load of it. Then there were these eggs that were hanging around in my fridge, waiting to be used, and this butter saying, "use me, use me, I am space consuming!", and a block of gruyere. And I thought, right, clearly, quiche is in order. Unfortunately, in my life I am surrounded (here and at home, at everywhere!) by egg haters, milk haters, meat haters, all kinds of haters. Which means that when I make quiche, I always end up eating most of it. Which is okay! Especially because it can pass for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

But for this reason it got delayed and delayed until this weekend when I said, "right. This butter needs to go. These eggs need to go. This milk needs to go. I want fridge space again!" (For you see, my flat has a tiny fridge shared by four of us. I get about 1.5 square feet of fridge real-estate and things that hang around for weeks make me antsy.) Of course, I promptly filled up my fridge with vegetables, so now it is even more cramped in there, but such is life.

Sadly, on my bespoken quiche day, I had a bit of a life crisis in the morning but a very productive afternoon, so as dinnertime loomed, I kept working instead of stopping to quiche up the kitchen. Which is why it is slightly undercooked, as you see:

But still delicious! This quiche has bacon (although bacon here tends towards Canadian bacon, which is unsurprising given the Canadian's brown-nosing habits), zucchini (here they call it courgette, because they never really got over that 1066 debacle, personally I think they should call it the freedom vegetable), asparagus and gruyere (cheeeeese).

Aside from the crust, the making of quiche is very simple. You cook up all your individual ingredients, put them in the par-baked crust, and then pour a mixture of eggs and milk (or, you know, cream) on top and stick it in the oven for half an hour. Actually, I had some left over that wouldn't fit in the crust, so I just did an additional little crustless quiche. Fairly quick, fairly healthy, especially if you subscribe to the Linden school of quiches, which says, No Cream, and delicious! (I believe it's basically the same as Xan's egg contraptions, except the milk makes it less cakey.)

Thus, my dinner the next night was potato wedges, asparagus, and crustless quiche.

The quiche was the last in a long detour into making unhealthy things that were low on vegetables (sadly, I forgot to photograph the curry puffs I made a few weeks ago, which were squarely in the middle of this detour). I'm now pushing my little (admittedly heavier) boat back towards the smooth waters of vegetables and balanced diets. (With occasional baked-good induced choppy seas.) See that asparagus there? Alas, only the beginning.

Linden's unexciting breakfast wrap

Dear Family,

I don't understand why sometimes I open this blog up after two days absence and there are five new foodphotos from different people, and sometimes I open it up and there is nothing but my recently deceased cookies staring sadly back at me. I am getting better at remembering to photograph my food though - tonight, I remembered as I almost finished eating.

I am in the process of preparing for something sort of exciting (although it will probably have to wait until Thursday or Friday night), but it means that the fridge is sort of full of my food, and in fear of my roommate's wrath I decided I had better use up some leftovers. Thus, I had scrambled eggs with green beans and onion (and salt and pepper and chili powder) in a wrap with some cheddar cheese, which was then heated up until it was crispy instead of stale.


Because that is rather high on cheeeese (which I admittedly enjoy, but also make me sleepy and unproductive), I rounded it out with an apple and a pear. (I had some help with the pear.)

Family, I have realised two things: (1) cooking every night takes a lot of spare creativity (2) nonstick pans are god. (I have neither creativity to spare, nor a nonstick pan. But I shall soldier on!)

ps - a sidenote: there are these things called labels which make life better later on. consider it!