Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese Quiche

I've been pretty busy catching up with work and such since I got back from South Africa, but everyone needs to eat, and if you are going to eat, you may as well eat well! This is a favorite dish of mine, which I only started making about 2 years ago - I wanted to make a quiche, but the only vegetable I had around the apartment were onions (I always have onions and garlic floating around - they are bare necessities in my kitchen), and I happened to have some goat cheese in the fridge. So, I looked up a recipe for onion/goat cheese quiches and found a LOT of them - so this is my blend of several recipes scattered across the internet.  As a bonus, this is a good vegetarian meal! 


Caramelized Onion and Goat Cheese Quiche
1 standard pie crust
2 red onions
1 tbs balsamic vinegar
4-8 oz goat cheese (depending how cheesy you want it, or how big the packet of goat cheese you bought happens to be... I'd tend towards more than less, but it's really up to you. I usually just put in the whole chunk of goat cheese I purchased.)
3 large eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup cream
nutmeg
salt and pepper
cayenne pepper (optional, to taste)

Onions: I put this step first because it takes the longest, but while the onions are cooking, you should deal with pre-baking your pie crust, as well. But to get a nice caramelization going on your onions, you need to cook them slowly, over the course of about an hour. First, french your onions. If you are not familiar with this term, that's OK, I wasn't either when I made this recipe for the first time. What you are going for is long, thin strands of onion. So, chop of the top and bottom of the onion, and peel it. Next, slice the onion in half, down the length of the it (from the top to the bottom), like an orange splits. Then, in the same direction, cut thin slices off of the onion, so you get nice long slices - see the picture to the left! Once your onions are all frenched up, put some olive oil in a pan on medium heat. Add the onions, sprinkle some salt over them, and cook for 10 minutes until they're starting to become soft and translucent. At this point, reduce the heat to LOW, and cook for about 30 minutes more (moving them around occasionally) until they're becoming brown and very soft. Add the balsamic vinegar and mix well, and cook 10 minutes more on low until they're caramelized and delicious! Then remove from heat and set aside.

Honestly, these onions are delicious by themselves, but take a while. So if you think you'll have use for them, you may as well cook some extras up while you are doing this. They're really good, sweet, even,  and consider that they're basically onions and vinegar. Mind, it IS balsamic vinegar, the most delicious vinegar ever! Silly though it may be, I still remember the first time I had it balsamic as a salad topping, at a German restaurant in DC - I was just amazed at how tasty the stuff was, and insisted my parents buy some right away for the next time we had salad at home. But then, I do tend to have a memory for food -  seriously, I can completely forget a face I've met only once, but take me to a restaurant I've been to once before, and I'll tell you exactly what I ate and how I liked it. Ah well.

Pie Crust: Preheat your oven to 400F. Make up your pie dough. Now here, I admit I cheat a bit. I don't actually make my own pie crust very often. I've made it via a mix, and I've made it when baking with friends who have their own recipes, but when I'm just cooking for myself, I generally cheat and buy frozen Pillsbury pie dough - it's pie dough, NOT pre-baked (as those tend to get dry), which you can cut up, or pre-bake yourself, or whatever you want to do with your pie crust. I pretty much always have a box in my freezer for spontaneous pie or quiche. Very useful! Anyways, once you have your pie crust dough, fit it into a standard pie pan. If you don't have a pie pan, I have, in the past, improvised and used a 8-inch circular cake pan, which will work just fine - however, I generally use my grandmothers pie pan, much easier to deal with. At this point, if you happen to have them, you can weight the crust down with pie weights. Alternatives include dried lentils, or beans, or whatever - the point is to prevent the bottom from puffing up and deforming while the crust bakes - I generally skip this step and it works out fine, but it certainly doesn't hurt to do. Pre-bake for 10-15 minutes (or whatever your pie recipe calls for) until its a nice, light brown. It will be going back in the oven later, with quiche in it, so don't over do it or the outer crust will get a little too toasty. (Mmm... toasty.). Let cool.

Onions and Goat cheese on the bottom

Filling and Baking: Preheat the oven to 325F. Blend milk, cream, egg, spices, and up to half the cheese until liquified and homogenous. Take your onions, and spread about half of them on the bottom of your pie crust, and crumble some more of the goat cheese on top of that. (In this particular pie, I was using 4 oz of goat cheese total - 2 oz in the blender, 1 oz on the bottom, and 1 oz sprinkled on top. I generally use a little more, but that's what I had around today.) Then pour your filling into the tart. Top with the rest of the onions and goat cheese (it will sink into the pie as you bake it, but you want it layered a bit). Bake for ~45 minutes until starts browning on the top - it's a good idea to check on it every so often, as you don't want it getting overdone, either.

Filled, not baked, and topped with
the remaining onions and goat cheese

This is friggen' delicious. My department has 'morning coffee' twice a week, with people rotating to bring in snacks to go with coffee, which I like to volunteer for every once in a while. Of the various things I bring in, this is definitely one of the most popular. I also like to bring in homemade bread with my bread machine, since usually one quiche by itself wouldn't be enough for everyone (and it tends to disappear FAST). On this occasion, however, I made it all for myself (and for my roommate, who made up a nice salad to go with it), for dinner and a nice lunch tomorrow.

Fun times with Kaila and Benson

This past week, Benson (my boyfriend, visiting from California for a wedding) and I went up to Waltham for a couple days to visit a friend from undergrad, Kaila. I lived with her for two years while I was at Brandeis University, in a house with 5 girls total, including us. And I miss her cooking, she's a great cook. All three of us, in fact, quite enjoy cooking and eating well, so we made a very nice feast on Tuesday night. Again, a good way to bond and chat with people, with a delicious result. First, the main course.

My co-chefs, Benson and Kaila

Chicken Cordon Bleu, as found on that very useful site, allrecipes.
6 chicken breasts
6 slices of sliced cheese
6 slices of ham
3 tbs of flour
1 tsp paprika
a handful of breadcrumbs (not in the recipe, but we added it anyway)
3 tbs butter
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup white wine
1 or 2 bouillon cubes
1 tbs cornstarch
1 cup whipping cream

We altered this recipe a bit, namely in our cooking method and the addition of breadcrumbs, but I think it turned out really nicely (we also halved it). Mix the flour and paprika (and we added some breadcrumbs), which will make up the crust of your chicken. Pound out the chicken breasts flat. Lay the cheese and the ham up in a roll, securing with toothpicks. Then roll in the egg, and bread with the crumb mixture. Next, pan fry the chicken packets in butter until they're nicely browned, and bake at 350F for 20-30 minutes, until fully cooked.

Meanwhile, for the sauce, mix the cornstarch and cream in a small bowl, and add to the skillet with the wine and a bouillon cube. Stir constantly until the cube dissolves (as cream can be finicky), and taste to see if you want a stronger chicken flavor - if so, add another bouillon cube. You want to cook this on medium-low heat until it has thickened into a nice saucy consistency. Then, when both sauce and chicken are complete, serve: pour the sauce over the chicken (or allow each person to do that on their own). Watch out for the toothpicks! It might be a good idea to remove those before serving to guests, or at very least warn them!

As sides, we also made Mashed Potatoes and Pan Roasted Parsnips. The potatoes were from scratch, and pretty straightforward (peel, cube, and boil potatoes; mash with butter, milk, salt and pepper until the right consistency and seasoning is reached! Add a bit of garlic for fun.) Similarly, the parsnips were another simple and delicious vegetable. If you haven't tried parsnips, they're really simple and easy to make. They look like giant albino carrots, and have a wonderful nuttiness to them. Here, we just peeled them and sliced them thin, and cooked them with a bit of butter, salt and pepper. Couldn't be more simple, couldn't be more delicious. An interesting and tasty vegetable! We also made Gruyere Cheese Gougeres (aka, cheese puffs), a recipe from the French Laundry Cookbook, but I think I'll save those for another post. They're a bit complicated, and French Laundry deserves it's own place to shine, really, it's a great book.


Finally, for dessert, we made:

Apples Pielettes (Cup-pies!)
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
3 TBS salted butter
1/4 cup apple juice
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 tsp apple pie spice - aka some cinnamon, and a pinch each of cloves and allspice, with, in our case, a bit of nutmeg as well. Kaila cooking ALWAYS involves nutmeg!
1 tbs cornstarch
8 soft caramel candies
3 baking apples, pealed, cored, and chopped into 1/2 inch pieces

Crust:
2 11-oz boxes of pie crust mix
1/2 cup water
1 egg, beaten

Anyways, you want to put the sugar, butter, apple juice, cream, spices, cornstarch and caramel in a pot on medium heat, so that everything melts all together, stirring constantly. Then add in the apples, and bring to a boil. Simmer for 8-10 minutes - you want the apples to still hold the shape, but the sauce to be thick and syrupy. Then remove from heat and set aside. This is delicious, and if you have leftovers, you can do what we did and make french toast the following morning and have this as the topping!

A dough blender

Heat the oven to 425F, then make up the pie crust. We actually used Kaila's pie crust recipe instead of the box kind: 3 cups flour, 1 tsp salt, and 1 cup crisco, and a bit of water to keep it sticking together, all smashed together with a dough blender (NOT electronic, though it sounds that way!). Usually, I admit, when I make pies or quiche I use the pillsbury frozen ready made pie crust doughs - the crust isn't pre-baked, it's still dough form so you can shape it a bit, and you can bake it exactly as required by the recipe, and that's just fine. They're pretty tasty. But I have been thinking I want to try my hand at making actual crust, especially as it's fairly straightforwards. If you have your own recipe for crust, you want enough for a two crust pie. So just make that up, and divide in half. Take one half, then roll it out to 1/4 to 1/8 thickness.  Using a 4 inch cookie cutter (or the rim of a 13-oz coffee can), cut out 6 circles which you put in the bottom of a cupcake pan as the bottom of the cup-pies, then cut out 6 smaller 2 3/4  circles (with a glass rim, perhaps), which you'll use as the top. Then repeat this with the OTHER half of the dough, for an even dozen.

Fill each of the up pie crusts with the filling, and put the tiny circles on top, pinching all around the rim to seal them - make sure they're sealed tight! then slice a few slivers through the pie crust tops so they can vent (in decorative patterns, preferably!). Brush all over with egg so the crusts are a nice golden brown. Bake for 15 minutes until nice and brown, then remove from the oven. You can remove these from the muffin tin after perhaps about 10 minutes of letting them cool. And then, delicious pie-letts!

Pumpkin Pie-lettes

We liked these so much, the next day we did the whole thing again, only with pumpkin pie filling, instead. Note that if you take a random pie filling recipe, you'll end up with extra filling, so we had to take some dough and make one extra big pie-lette (not shown).

Anyway, Benson and I had a wonderful time visiting Kaila. We didn't JUST cook, naturally, we also walked around Waltham, which is really nice to do, since I DID live there for 4 years; we went to see Wreck-it-Ralph (a lot of fun, worth seeing); we watched some Arrested Development (Kaila hadn't seen it, though Benson and I had); and generally had a nice time. Benson left to go back to California, and I stayed an extra couple of days. And cooked some more, but thats another blog post!

Dinner is served!!!

Hurricanes, Hotdogs, and Pie (oh my!)

You might think that me leaving New York for a week has apparently reaped some unexpected benifits - namely, missing the worst of Hurricane Sandy. New York was, after all, hit much harder than Baltimore. However, my apartment in NYC did not have any outages or flooding, whereas my parents' home in Baltimore did not quite escape unscathed. We have two separate power lines connected to the house, apparently, and ONE of them was hit. Which means that most of the upstairs is without power. The downstairs is almost entirely unaffected - save for the odd outlet. It's pretty easy to work around, honestly - my father was able to simply use an extension cord so that the fridge and stove were powered by a different, working outlet. No flooding at all, and the hot water is running just fine. However, we have no heat. It is not overly chilly for this time of year, but it does feel a bit.. brisk, especially at night and first thing in the morning. But it's easy enough to bundle up in an extra sweater and sleep in a sleeping bag, so I'd rather have hot water than heat in this situation. Plus, lack of heat means that we've had the excuse to use our fireplace, all day! Which resulted in last night's dinner: hotdogs and s'mores, roasted over the fire, of course! So all's well that ends well.

For that good charcoal flavor

The perfect crispy brown roast.

In other cozy, stuck-in-the-house-all-day news, it also seemed appropriate to carve the pumpkin. In the past, I've done my fair share of elaborate pumpkins, but sometimes a more "classic" design is appreciated. So I went with a tried and true design - the one people think of when people think of jack'o'lanterns: triangles everywhere!

Boo!

Not only is it simpler to do this style of pumpkin, but it tends to last better. If you do elaborate carvings with fine details, those details start to curl within a day or so. This design is not going to fade until the pumpkin itself starts to rot. I just did a few marks for guidance (trying to maintain symmetry), then once I cut the basic shapes out, trimmed away a bit of the pumpkin flesh from the inside so that, when lit, the design showed clearly. I think it turned out rather well! Not going to win pumpkin of the year award, but nice.



Besides pumpkins, my family's other Halloween tradition is a wonderful "Halloween Pie" - aka, a delicious French apple tart, which I baked this afternoon.

French Apple Tart
1 sheet frozen puff pastry (defrosted)
3 or 4 large apples, peeled
2 tbs melted butter
2 tbs confectioners' sugar
2 tbs apple jelly

Preheat the oven to 400F. Roll the pastry out with a rolling pin, 11x7 goes to 12x18 inches, flouring the pastry so it doesn't stick to the pan or the rolling pin. Prick a 1-inch border around the crust, and prick all over in the center of the pastry. Now, I always make a picture with my fork prickings, since after all, there's no need to be BORING. This will soon be covered with apples, ne'er to be seen again. If you've ever eaten this pie, I guarentee you I made a picture under it that you never knew about. I've done everything from pictures of my house, to neutron stars with high energy jets, to an attempt at Van Gogh's "Starry Night." This time, you can see my attempt at reproducing the pumpkin I carved earlier.

Now, you'll want to remove the core and seeds of the apple with a melon scoop (or spoon), and thinly slice the apples into pretty crescent shapes. If you happen to have an apple peeler/core-er, you're in luck, and this step becomes much easier: just insert and twist. But there IS something to be said for the old fashioned method, trying to get the apple peel in one long curl. If nothing else, it's a challenge!

Now simply lay out your apples in a lovely and decorative pattern - unlike your fork pattern, this one will be seen - and brush the whole thing generously with butter. Sprinkle confectioners sugar over that, and bake for 20-25 minutes, until the apples are tender and the pastry is puffed and golden. Let the tart cool, then melt the jelly in a saucepan over low heat. This makes a lovely glaze which you can brush over the entire tart, which adds some nice extra apple flavor and makes it look even prettier.

For best results, be sure to chant: "Halloween Pie, Halloween Pie, if I don't get some, I think I'm gonna die!"

The only day each year I can go out as a fairy princess  and no one will think it overly odd...