Pesto in a Quiche

I love making quiche for dinner and Sweetie loves eating it. The great thing about quiche is that you can put lots of different things in it and so it's a creative kind of pie.

This time I had some grilled chicken leftovers to use up, plus a few spears of fresh asparagus. I decided to do a flavor combination that has worked well for me in the past for a sandwich...chicken and pesto with roasted red pepper and Swiss cheese. I put all of those things in, plus some caramelized onion, the asparagus, and a couple large bella mushrooms, sliced. It was delicious, so I want to share with you! 

Pesto Quiche with Grilled Chicken and Roasted Red Pepper Serves 4 - 6

1 9-inch pie shell, blind baked at 425 degrees F for 10-12 minutes (use favorite pie dough recipe or pre-made)
1/3 cup caramelized yellow onion
1 cup Swiss cheese, cut into ¼ inch dice
1 cup grilled chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch cubes
4 stalks fresh asparagus, ends snapped off, spears cut into 1-inch pieces
2 large mushrooms, sliced
3 eggs (or equivalent egg substitute)
1 ½ cups evaporated milk  or light cream
1/3 cup prepared pesto
¼ teaspoon salt
dash pepper
5 or 6 strips prepared roasted red peppers
2 tablespoons pine nuts

Blind bake the pie shell in a preheated 400 degree oven, then set aside to cool.

Reduce heat setting on oven to 350 degrees F.

Caramelize the onion with a light coating of olive oil in a small crock pot or in a skillet and let cool .

Sprinkle the bottom of the pie shell with the onions and half the Swiss cheese, distributing evenly. Top with the chicken and the asparagus, then the rest of the Swiss cheese. Place mushroom slices around the outer edges of the quiche fillings. Set crust with fillings aside.

In a bowl, beat the eggs lightly with the pesto, then add the milk and beat with a fork to combine, add the salt and pepper and beat with a fork or whisk to combine.

Pour the egg/milk mixture over the ingredients in the pie shell.  There may be too much milk mixture if pie pan is shallow - don't overfill, to avoid filling running over.  Add the red pepper strips in a nice pattern on the top. Sprinkle with the pine nuts.

Put the quiche on a baking sheet. Place in the preheated oven and bake 30-45 minutes, or until set and lightly browned. (I find that setting on a parchment-lined small baking sheet is a good idea in case some of the filling spills over.) Cool for 10 minutes before cutting to serve.

Mocha

Our weekend included a lovely brunch on Sunday with long time friends and, in the afternoon, tea and a game of Rubicubes with an artist friend of mine. I've been wanting to bake so the tea gave me a good excuse to bake a mocha loaf cake. I'm afraid that I over baked it just a tiny bit, so it wasn't as moist as I would like, but otherwise it was delicious, a perfect example of a nice pound cake.

The recipe is based on one I baked a while ago, a chocolate and coffee marble cake, but this time I skipped the marble part and went for mocha. The espresso powder went into the flour mixture, but, this time, I also changed out the chocolate chips for cocoa powder. The cocoa powder also went into the flour mixture. I also added the vanilla to the milk which made it really easy to mix; butter beaten, butter and sugar beaten, eggs added one at a time and beaten after each, then three parts of the flour mixture divide by two of the milk mixture.

Do watch that you don't burn the top (which can be tented with foil if needed) and check it earlier than the recipe calls for so that you don't over-bake as I did. With care you will end up with a moist, tender, fine crumbed delicious mocha loaf cake, too...tea and a game are optional, but nice. 

Mocha Cake

base on Double Chocolate Marble Cake in Dorie Greenspan's  Baking Chez Moi

Makes one loaf cake

2 cups (272 grams) all-purpose flour

1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon espresso powder

6 tablespoons cocoa powder (dark if possible)

1 1/2 sticks (12 tablespoons, 6 oz. 170 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature 

1 cup (200 grams) sugar

4 large eggs, at room temperature

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

1/2 cup (120 ml) milk, at room temperature (I used soy creamer)

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Stack two baking sheets or use an insulated baking sheet and on it place a 9x5-inch loaf pan that has been buttered and floured, with excess flour tapped out of it.

Whisk the flour, baking powder, salt and espresso powder in a medium bowl. Whisk in the cocoa powder. Set aside.

In a stand mixer bowl beat the butter on medium speed for 3 minutes, using the paddle attachment, or use a large bowl and a hand mixer to do the same thing. Add the sugar and beat for another 2-3 minutes. Scrape bowl and beater(s), then add the eggs, one at a time, and beat for 1 minute after each addition. Don't worry if the batter curdles.

 Make sure that the milk is at room temperature. Put into a small bowl and mix in the vanilla. Reduce mixer speed to low. Scrape bowl and beater(s). Again on low speed, add the flour mixture in three additions and the milk mixture in two additions, starting and ending with the flour mixture. Mix only until each addition is incorporated. Avoid over-mixing. Scrape batter into the prepared pan and use a spatula to spread evenly.

Bake the cake for 70-80 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. do not overbake. Top may be cracked...that's OK. At about half way, check the cake and tent with foil if the top seems to be browning too quickly.

Cool the cake on a cooling rack for 10 minutes, then unmold it, then turn it right side up on the rack and cool to room temperature. Store at room temperature, wrapped well, for up to 4 days. Freeze for longer storage.

Spring

If you've been a reader here for long, you know that my favorite season is Fall, but Spring is right behind it. We are having such a lovely spring, full of days with sun, days with rain and everything in between.

Because it's been cooler than average, the seedlings are still in the sunspace waiting for the soil to warm up a bit for planting time. They are getting bigger and the squash are, in a misguided abundance of hope, flowering already. I do hope to get them planted out soon. The irrigation system and lots of pots are almost ready, too. Our gopher and weasel populations make it impossible to plant them out directly in the soil.

Flowers have been great this year. The bulbs have produced beautiful daffodils (see photo at top of post), tulips and even a couple of hyacinths. The lilacs are at their peak right now. Some of the roses, like bright red Altissimo,

have bloomed and more are just starting. 

The calla lilies have been blooming for a few weeks.

Yesterday I saw the first poppy bloom, but there are a bunch of those almost ready. I planted a seed mix in the winter that included poppies and it looks like they did well, so sometime soon I'll post photos of those. Today the first iris of the season bloomed and it's just gorgeous!

We had rain when the plums bloomed, so there won't be many of those stone fruits this year to eat. Had some rain during the time of the early apple blossoms, but the largest and youngest tree is blooming now and the weather is fine, so fingers crossed that we get lots of Red Gravenstein apples. Hard to tell with the pears, quince and persimmons because there was some rain but not much during their bloom. We'll see.

The olallieberries are just starting to bloom down by the road. They bloom and produce fruit a few weeks before the regular blackberries, so I always get a thrill when I see their lovely white flowers decorating the shrubs.

I wish I could say that I've been getting eggs from neighbors, but here are some like I got a few weeks ago.

For those who celebrate it, Happy Easter!  Happy Passover!  Happy Earth Day (in a few days)!

XO Elle  

Rice and Spinach Pie

This dish is very similar to the Moosewood Cookbook's casserole recipe that has similar ingredients, but turning it into a pie creates a different delight. For one thing, the rice crust turns crispy on the side near the pan but is soft and delicious, too, where it meets the spinach filling. Because there are eggs in both the rice crust and the filling, it all slices well and holds together for serving. It is fine as the main dish, but we had some salmon that we'd bought the day before, so Sweetie grilled that and I made the pie.

I was gifted this recipe from an old friend, Ginny, who is also my hairdresser. Her Granny Anne was an excellent cook and this was one of the family favorites...and one of the ones where the amounts were written out at some point. Like many cooks of her generation, Granny Anne was a skilled cook who often just threw things together, not measuring and not writing down a recipe. Ginny learned to cook from Granny Anne...her own mother was apparently a terrible cook! 

Granny Anne learned to cook in her late teens from a doctor's wife. It was the time of the Dust Bowl in the mid-West and Granny Anne's family were farmers in South Dakota. They lost their farm and, like many others, moved to California. Anne's father found her employment with a doctor's family. She was a hard worker, but her work up until then had been twelve hour days working the fields, not cooking. That's what she told the doctor's wife, who then asked her if she could read and write. Anne said she could, so the doctor's wife assured her that she could learn to cook...and then proceeded to teach her how! Anne became a fantastic cook and used to cook her extended family huge meals which included jellied salads, green salad, home made dressings, asparagus with hollandaise, broccoli with brown butter, freshly made Parker House rolls, plus a wonderful roast or a dish like this and also grilled chicken. And that's before serving dessert like a wonderful mocha pie. Ginny kept all her recipe books once she had passed and I hope to bring you more of Granny Anne's culinary delights in the future.

Some of the best recipes work by throwing things together...and it's sometimes impossible to go back and figure out all the measurements, ingredients, techniques and so on to recreate the most delectable ones. Glad that this one was a written down recipe, even if I wrote it up with more detail...but posted the original so that you can see how it was written by Granny Anne. Sweetie really, really enjoyed it! 

When I realized that I had better get going if this was going to be ready by dinner time, I also discovered that I didn't have time to cook the rice unless we were going to eat an hour late. Fortunately I had microwavable packets of already cooked rice...one of brown rice and one of long grain and wild rice. I heated both packets up, then mixed them together for the rice crust. I know that plain rice would have been fine, but I do think that the added flavor of the brown and wild rices just makes this even more wonderful. I couldn't find a chunk of Swiss cheese at the store, so I bought slices, then cut them thinly and cross cut them for the rice mixture. I had some left over, so I did the same thing and used that to top the spinach mixture before baking. The photo below shows the baked rice and spinach pie.

Granny Anne's Rice and Spinach Pie
8 servings

2 cups cook rice
2/3 cup shredded Swiss cheese
1 egg, well beaten

10 package frozen spinach, thawed and drained of all excess liquid

2 tablespoons butter, melted
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup cottage cheese
3 eggs, well beaten

6 tablespoons thick cream or evaporated milk  (I used soy creamer)

1/4 cup grated parmesan
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg (freshly ground if you can)
a few drops hot sauce or 1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

Grease a 9-inch deep (at least 2 inches) pie pan. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, mix together the rice, cheese and egg. Place in the greased pie pan and use a flexible spatula (or clean hands) to spread the rice over the bottom and up the sides of the pan. Set aside.

In a medium bowl combine the spinach, melted butter and salt. Then stir in the cottage cheese. Add the 3 eggs and combine with the spinach mixture. Add the creamer or milk and stir to combine well, then do the same with the parmesan cheese. Add the nutmeg and hot sauce or cayenne and stir to combine.

Pour the spinach mixture into the pie pan over the rice mixture. Use a spatula to smooth the mixture into an even layer, leaving the rice at the top of the pie pan edges exposed.

Bake in a preheated 350 degree F. oven for 30-40 minutes, or until the crust is browned and the filling is cooked through.

Cool 5 minutes, then cut into wedges and serve.

Below is the recipe as written by Granny Anne

It's NOT An April Fools Day Joke

Sweetie is so proud of my blogging that he has been telling people for a few months that I've had over 2 million pageviews. While that is flattering, it hasn't been true...but today it is. I checked just before I wrote this post and the analytics/stats showed 2 million and 91 pageviews!

It's pretty amazing that people are still looking at blogs given the huge number of other social media choices that they have. Blogs are now sort of old fashioned, but I'm very flattered that you readers are still turning to Feeding My Enthusiasms for great recipes, especially for bread and baking, and some fun fairy tales about baking plus a bit here and there about my life, kitchen implements, and my garden.

Please keep coming because it encourages me to continue writing, photographing and putting it all together for you. If you haven't used the Index, you're missing out on a great 'recipe box' because I have over 1,000 recipes. Don't know how to access the Index? Be sure you are in web view (which you can find on you phone by scrolling down to the last post and clicking on Web View), then look on the right side of the blog and you'll find the link just below the Welcome paragraphs where it says Recipe Link. Just click the photo. No photo? Try clicking in the middle where the photo should be. If you have trouble, you can always email me at plachman 'at'sonic'dot'net.

Thanks for being a reader of Feeding My Enthusiasms! Try a new recipe...be creative in the kitchen...have fun and be kind to yourself.

XO, Elle