vegetable quiche

Since graduating culinary school I have been cooking at home. Some of it's stuff I photographed and meant to put up, except the recipe didn't turn out right or I didn't like how the results tasted, so nothing's come up here yet.

Never fear, however. I will continue blogging sporadically while I attempt to write my very own culinaryme cookbook.

This vegetable quiche will be one of the included recipes - the first time I made this marked my discovery of fontina cheese as the perfect quiche cheese. The vegetables were just what I had on time at the time, but it turned out great so I decided to make it again. You can surely add meat but you won't miss it if you don't.

First, the crust. I looked around at quiche crust recipes but defaulted to a French classic, pâte brisée, or shortcrust pastry.



That's 1 and 3/4 cup all purpose flour (APF), 1 stick unsalted butter, 1 egg, 1 tsp crème fraîche (to make it more French) and 1/2 tsp salt.

The flour is sifted with the salt and the butter is cold/hard and grated with a cheese grater to render the butter into bits. (If you have a food processor there's that option too.)



Beat the egg and pour it into a well in the flour. Incorporate the egg into the flour, then add the crème fraîche and knead. Refrigerate for an hour or so before you roll it out.



Here is the crust rolled out and into a 8" cake pan. I poked holes with a fork so the crust wouldn't inflate from butter steam. This went into a 325F oven for about 5 minutes, until it got golden.



For the filling, I had thyme, 1 shallot (minced), 1 zucchini (diced), 1 box mushrooms (sliced) and half a bag of spinach. These were sauteed with a little oil - shallot first, then mushroom and thyme, then zucchini, and spinach last.



Besides the vegetables the filling consisted of 1 cup heavy cream, 4 eggs, 8 oz fontina cheese, 2 oz jalapeno havarti (or some other spicy white cheese), 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 tsp pepper and 1/2 tsp nutmeg.



Everything was mixed and poured into the quiche crust, which was returned to the oven and baked for another ~45 minutes.



I took it out when it got golden brown on top but was still a little gooey inside. If you prefer it firmer, you can cover it with aluminum foil and bake it a bit longer. Satisfying either way!