Quiche

Quiche is one of my new favorites.  A good way to use up spare veggies and cheese that are close to turning or if you have eggs you need to use up in the fridge.  I make the pastry dough myself, which was certainly intimidating until I learned.  Hopefully this explanation will be simple but thorough enough to avoid any intimidation.  Homemade crusts aren't hard once you learn.  And you'll never go back to store bought crusts after that.

If you plan to make this quiche all the way through (from making dough, rolling it, baking, filling, and cooking), there's a lot of wait time, so bake on a day that you have the time and a new magazine just came in the mail or you just bought a new book.

For the quiche crust, you'll need:

• 3 cups flour
• touch of salt
• tablespoon or so Italian seasoning (Yes, I advocate trying your uncooked dough to see if you want to add more seasoning.)  This is a key ingredient and makes the dough oh-so-delicious!  I use the cheapest, most generic blend available
• 1 cup chilled butter (I use salted, though most recipes you'll find call for unsalted.  This means I use less salt in the rest of the recipe)
• 1 egg
• aluminum foil

The steps:

• In a large bowl, combine flour, salt, and Italian seasoning.  A good indicator that you have enough seasoning is that your mixture will be speckled like a Dalmatian.
• Cut the butter into small pieces and add to the bowl.  
• To blend the butter with the flour, it's best to use a pastry blender, but I'm too cheap to buy one, so I use my sturdiest fork and my hands.  You don't want the butter to be totally combined, but rather like little pebbles in the flour, or, at the very best, a coarse meal.  Of course, you don't want to handle the butter too much either and melt it.  I usually go at it with the fork, cutting it in small pieces and combining as best I can.  Then I use my fingertips to pinch the butter into little pieces.  Try to have pieces be of somewhat uniform small size, but it's okay if there are some bigger chunks.
• In a small bowl, beat the egg with 2 tablespoons cold water.
• Make a well in the flour mixture and pour in the egg and a couple more tablespoons water
• Using the fork, gently combine egg and flour, adding more cold water as needed until the mixture holds together.  You don't want the consistency to be sticky like cookie dough, but more like biscuit dough.  Just add water and mix very gradually until it just barely sticks together.
• Pat this dough into a ball, cover in Saran wrap, and refrigerate for an hour.
• While the dough is cooling, you could work on the filling.  I'll describe some options below.
• After that hour is up, clear off a large surface and dust lightly with flour.  Also dust your rolling pin with flour. I usually refrigerate my rolling pin along with the dough for that hour (or at least 15 minutes) to help with sticking.
• Roll out the dough until it's less than a half inch thick, but not too much thinner than that.  
• Be conscientious when your rolling of the shape of the pan in which you'll be baking.  I usually bake in a 9 x 13 pan, so it's easy to roll into a rectangle.  This recipe will allow you to fill that 9 x 13 and have leftovers (more on that later).  If you are using pie pans, roll circularly.  This recipe would fill 2 pie pans.
• Transfer the dough into greased baking pan and trim off any excess.  If you're feeling fancy, you could pinch the top edge of the dough to make it look nice, but it'll be delicious even if you don't.
• Prick the bottom of the dough several times with a fork.
• Cover dough with aluminum foil, shiny side down, and place in the freezer for a half hour.
• After that time is up, bake the crust, with the foil, in a preheated oven at 425 for 8 minutes.
• Remove the foil and bake until crust looks dull (the butter has soaked in.  Yum!).  About 4 minutes.
• Remove from oven, reduce heat to 375.  If you are putting cheese in your quiche, sprinkle it on the hot crust now.

For the filling:

• Basic ingredients all to be blended together: 3 eggs (beaten), 1 pint half 'n half, teaspoon sugar.
• To this mixture, you can add all sorts of things.  Of course, I love cheese, so put some of that directly on the crust before your add the mixture.  Then just use any veggies you may need to use up.  Because you can't test before the quiche is complete, you'll need to do some sampling just by making quiche every once and awhile and paying attention to what worked and what didn't.  Some veggies work better when cooked before, others are fine if put it raw.  Use your best judgement (or Google someone else's).
• Some combinations I know are delicious:
• spinach & feta: before adding, sauté the spinach in olive oil with some minced garlic
• radishes, leeks & mozzarella: I also used the radish greens and diced up all the veggies nice and small.
• Turkey & vegetable: roasted turkey chunks, asparagus, whatever other veggies you have.
• leeks, tomatoes, snow peas, & parmesan: well, I don't know if that's delicious or not.  I'm working on it right now (dough is chilling in the fridge as I type)
• Once you have your combination settled, whisk the eggs, half 'n half, and sugar together then add your other ingredients.
• Pour this into the crust
• Bake 35-40 minutes, until it doesn't jiggle anymore.
• Let stand for 5-10 minutes before serving.

Other tips/ideas

• If you don't have all the time or aren't going to serve it right away, a great trick is to prepare the crust and veggies ahead of time.  Then place the veggies in the fully baked crust and freeze (a grocery bag or trash bag, tied off, works fine) until you need it.  When you are ready to bake, let thaw for a few hours, whisk up egg mixture, combine, and bake.  
• As I said earlier, this recipe will leave you some leftover dough if you use a 9 x 13 pan.  What to do?  you can freeze it and use it in the future for whatever you want.  I've been making mini-quiches.
• Yes, mini-quiches.  If you want to avoid this weird numbers game of having leftover dough, just make lots of mini-single serving quiches.  This could also allow you to personalize quiches to people's tastes (if you're feeling particularly generous).  Here's how I do it:
• Grease a ceramic bowl that you plan to bake and eat out of.  I use a bowl I or a friend made, because the shape and size is nice for this.  If you have small, single-serving size glass or corningware, you can use those.  Personally, I think the ceramic bowls are extra nice looking
• Place the greased bowls in the oven and preheat to 425.  You only need to do this if you're using ceramic bowls which you need to be gentler with in terms of drastic temperature changes.  
• Once the oven is preheated, remove the bowls and carefully line them with the pastry dough.  Bake pastry dough as directed above, though the times may be shorter.  Difficult to make uniform as everyone's bowls or dishes are different.
• Once the crusts are done, reduce heat on the oven to 375, remove the bowls, prepare the filling, fill the bowls, and cook.  Again, timing may be different than in a larger pan.
• You can always make dough, roll it into a ball, and freeze it for later.
• You have to use real butter for the pastry dough.  Sorry, no margarine here.  Besides, there's like 3 ingredients in butter and how many in your vegetable butter replacement?  I know I know, fat, cholesterol, etc.  Here's my theory: enjoy your food, savor every bite.  Rather than rush through crappy food that may be made with margarine or artificial sweeteners (and what the hell are those made of?), eat slowly and appreciate the flavor of your food.  Relax.  Then you'll eat smaller portions (if you eat slower, you eat less).  

Okay, quiche away!