Quiche two ways and my friend bio

It has been a tradition for quite some time now to have Sunday dinners with some, many or all of our friends. The menu is always different, the food is always exceptional. It was at a Sunday dinner that the idea of a food blog was first born.

I made quiche for last Sunday's dinner and have made it again since then. For good reason.

I spent Sunday morning researching methods and different recipes and eventually settled on the version out of America's Test Kitchen. Honestly, I was a little bit disappointed. Don't get me wrong, the taste was what I imagine heaven to be like and the texture was tender and flakey. But my dough receded in the baking process and the shell had a few cracks in it and I'm a perfectionists and I can't really tolerate a few cracks in my tart shells, even if they will be equally delicious and eventually covered with filling.

However, I highly recommend this shell recipe with the sole exception that it will recede and there is nothing you can do about it (at least that I know of). Apparently, many tart shells will recede as is the nature of the dough.

Here's the recipe. In a food processor, add 1 1/2 cups of all purpose flour, 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Mix the dry ingredients by hitting the "GO!" button on the processor. Cut up a chilled stick of butter into tablespoons and drop into flour mixture. Blend until you have a consistency of clumpy sand. You know what I mean. Add a little under 3 tablespoons of ice cold water and blend into the mixture. Your dough has been made.

Now divide the dough into walnut sized pieces and place in your tart pan or pie pan. This will help the dough to spread evenly throughout the pan. Working from the middle of the pan outward, press dough to cover and the surface of the whole pan. Continue pressing dough up the sides so that it spills slightly over the side of the pan, then using your thumb, scrape off the overhanging dough. Use the scraps to fill in holes or thin areas in the shell. Put a sheet of plastic wrap over the shell and use your hand to really smooth it out. Pop your shell into the freezer and don't take it out until it's frozen solid.

Here's some pictures to clarify the shell-making process:

Now that your shell is frozen, preheat your oven to 375F. Place the pan on a baking sheet and bake the shell, covering with tin foil and weighing it down with a pie weight for 30 minutes.

Now for the filling. I'm going to keep this as short as possible. Put whatever you want in your quiche. Just make sure that your ingredients are pretty dry going in, otherwise you'll get a runny, mushy, kind of gross quiche.

For example, I generally use fresh spinach in my quiche. I'll throw some butter into a skillet, saute some garlic and then put in a heaping amount of fresh spinach and wilt it down. Then after I'm done, I disperse it onto a plate so that the juices dry up quite a bit before I throw it into my quiche.

That said here are some ideas for quiche fillings:

• Bacon, spinach, swiss cheese quiche- Cook and chop approximately 12 oz of bacon, pat dry and set aside. In a pan saute together spinach and garlic until spinach is throughly wilted. Use as much spinach as you would like. Grate up about a cup of swiss cheese.
• Black forest ham, spinach, provolone cheese quiche- Throw as much black forest ham into a skillet as you would like; once brown cut into pieces and set aside to dry. Follow spinach directions from above. Grate about a cup of provolone cheese.

I feel like you get the idea. Once you have all of your filling ingredients together and your shell is done, you simply place the filling into the shell. I like saving the cheese for the top layer. Do whatever your heart desires.

In a medium bowl, mix together 3 whole eggs, 2 additional egg yolks (makes quiche creamy), 1 cup of heavy cream, and 1 cup of milk. Season with salt and pepper. Pour egg mixture over the filling in the shell. Slide the whole tart pan (still on a baking sheet) into the oven on 375F for 40 minutes or until the top of the quiche has become golden-browny. Enjoy immediately, piping hot, straight out of the oven.

Now, for your enjoyment, my friend bio:

What I’ll bring to this blog: Easy recipes to food that is seemingly difficult to make and bad photography. No really, other contributors will take all of the photography on my posts. And they will never even get any of the credit.

Up my sleeve: Ciabatta bread, bagels, homemade ricotta, onion jam, and English muffins, and a slew of other carb-loaded, fat-enriched, simply delicious recipes.

If I had my own restaurant, it would be: A bagelry in Midtown OKC. If you’d like to invest in a bagelry, let me know.

Favorite food memory: Counting up the sticks of butter my girlfriends and I used to prepare a massive Thanksgiving feast for our friends in 2009. We stopped counting at 12 ½.

Favorite culinary-related memory: Shootin’ the shit with Mario Batali on bus at the airport in Bologna, Italy.

Cookbook I use most often: The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum.

Kitchen equipment I use most often: Kitchen Aid stand mixer, dutch oven, kitchen scale.

Kitchen equipment I use least often: Microwave and my ultra-expensive knife set.

Favorite ingredient to work with: All purpose, unbleached flour.

How I learned to cook: At 14, my Vietnamese mother told me I’d never find a husband if I didn’t learn to cook. A few days later, she told me that when she was my age, she was preparing full meals for her family of nine people. I buckled under the pressure of her subtle hints and here I am, ten years later.