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 The crust was originally made from bread dough, not pie crusts.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.

This is a quick and easy side dish. I usually serve it with tacos or fajitas.

1 cup rice
2 cups water
1 can ( 16oz ) diced tomatoes
1/2 onion
1/2 pepper

Dice the onion and pepper.

Put the rice, onion and pepper into a skillet with a bit of oil and fry until onions are clear and rice is just browning.

Put rice, tomatoes, water, onion and pepper into a large microwave bowl. Cook for about 15 minutes.

Check every 3 or so minutes after until rice is tender and water is gone. Add more water if needed.

This is more of a US SouthWest dish than Spanish. A version is common to Mexico but does not have the onions, peppers and tomato chunks. A tomato paste is added instead.

This dish is clearly derived from Spanish Paella. Paella is a rice dish cooked in one pan with vegetables and meat, usually chicken. Meat is cooked first, then vegetables are added and finally the rice.