Vegetable Quiche
I had never made a quiche before, but it was a perfect dish to prepare for a family picnic we were planning to have. Quiche is oven-baked with eggs and milk in a blind-baked pastry crust base. Blind-baking is simply pre-baking, either fully or partial, before putting any filling. The filling can be anything you want, I combined some of my favourite vegetables and cheese to make my filling. This was a bit lengthy, but an exciting journey as I decided to make the pasty from scratch, though you can always pick it up from your local store.
Serves 6; Total time: 1 hour to 1 1/2 hours.
Ingredients:
1/2 pack shortcrust pastry (freeze the rest for another time)
1 courgette, sliced
8-10 medium size mushrooms, sliced
1 large or 2 medium onions, sliced and caramelised
8-10 cherry tomatoes, halved
100 g goats cheese, sliced circles or crumbled
handful of basil leaves
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp olive oil
2 eggs
2 tbsp of butter
250 ml milk
25 g plain flour
Salt and pepper to taste
1. You can make your pastry by scratch as in instructed in these making and rolling videos. Otherwise, you can speed up the recipe by buying the shortcrust pastry. Roll pastry to 3-5mm thick or use the ready-rolled sheet. Gently place into a 24cm pie dish (or loose-bottom cake tin) being sure to push the pastry into the corners. Don’t worry if the pastry tears as you can easily cover up by putting a pinch of pastry to cover it up. Once the dish has been lined with pastry, blind-bake it while you prepare your filling.
2. To prepare the filling, melt butter in pan over medium heat. Cook mushrooms and courgettes for 5 minutes, stirring until starting to soften. Tip the milk and flour into the pan and stir until it thickens to a smooth sauce. Cool for 5 minutes or so.
3. Meanwhile cut onions and caramelise by heating olive oil in a pan on medium heat and cook onions until transparent (5 mins or so). Now add balsamic vinegar and cook for a few minutes until brown (not burnt). Set aside.
4. Whisk eggs, season generously and mix with the cooked vegetables from Step 2.
5. Assemble the quiche as follows: spread the vegetable and egg mix, layer the basil and caramelise onions, scatter the goats cheese and cherry tomatoes. Bake in the oven at 170C/335F for about 25-30 minutes.If you are serving for a dinner party, you can cook it for 15-20 minutes ahead of time and cook for the remaining time when ready to serve.
In my photo, the onions look a bit burnt (though they didn’t taste it), but if you have better photo after making yours, I would be happy to put it up so go ahead and cook this then get in touch with me :).
VegDelights 