Herself's Recipes

I love quiche. It is a quick easy side dish or meal and a great way to use up all the leftover vegetables and bits of cheese in your refrigerator.

We went to a gourmet English restaurant a few weeks back and they had some great quiche. More interesting is that they made it in individual dishes instead of as a pie. This meant you had a lot more crust per quiche. Also it would be faster to bake and the presentation is more impressive. I’ll be baking all mine that way from now on.

Quiche filling:

6 eggs

1 cup of whole milk ( or mix cream with 2% or skim milk )

About 1.5 cups of vegetables. Vegetables need to be cooked first so leftovers are great to use. Here are some of my favorite combinations:

{ tomatoes ( fresh – diced ), spinach, onions, cheddar cheese (grated) }

{ spinach, mushrooms, red peppers, goat cheese (diced) }

Mix all the ingredients.

Pie:

Use one pie crust to line the bottom of a 9″ pie plant.

Pour the filling into the pie.

Bake at 400′ about 40 minutes or until center is set. ( Many people cook the crust first for about 15 minutes then add the filling and bake until set. I always just cooked them together. )

Individual Pies:

One pie crust for each quiche

Line 2 pyrex cooking dishes ( ~6″ across x 2″ deep ) with the pie crust. Let the extra crust stand up around the edges.

Divide filling between the dishes

Bake at 400′ until center is set ~ 30 minutes.

There are medieval recipes for cheese, onion, spinach and spice tarts to be served on days that you were not supposed to eat meat. But quiche itself originally came from Germany. The word Quiche is from ‘Kuchen’ meaning cake in German. Originally it was made with eggs, milk and bacon. Later cooks added cheese. The crust was originally made from bread dough, not pie crusts. It gained popularity in England after WWII and in the United States shortly thereafter.

Grandma’s Lemon Pie

2 cups milk
2 eggs, separated
1 cup sugar
3 Tbsp cornstarch
pinch salt
juice from 1 lemon

Mix milk, sugar, salt and egg yolks and simmer over very low heat until warm

Add in cornstarch and milk and cook until thick

Remove from heat, add lemon

Beat eqq whites until stiff

Pour lemon mix into pie shell

Top with meringue (egg whites)

Bake at 350 until set and meringue just beginning to brown

This was a hand written recipe I found in a recipe box of my Grandmother’s.

Lemon meringue pie has been popular in the US since the 1800s especially in the southern part of the country. It is believed to have originated in Philly in the shops of Elizabeth Coane Goodfellow.