Quiche Le-Whatever You Want

It's not every day I, your average American Josephine-The-Plumber, thank my lucky stars for the French. They are, as the stereotype goes, rude, snobby, condescending, and suspiciously skinny given their per capita cheese and wine consumption (damn you!).  But, I forgive them all their faults because they gave my city the Statue of Liberty...and because they are the proverbial Michael Jordan of world cuisine. Seriously, while the Anglos were building a Navy and the Chinese working on gunpowder, the French took serious pains to master the uses of everything delicious on the sweet and savory spectrum. Clap for the French.

Pastries and Julia Child aside, I find most French cooking fairly simple in terms of both ingredients and procedures, and these characteristics appeal to my cooking simpleton sensibilities. Rebecca, my birthday twin from high school (who took our formative French language class years to the exxxtreme and lives in Paris!), nicely details some of the fine French consumption habits, namely that the French get all omg sacre bleu when it comes to eating non-seasonally.

This week, we were inundated again by beautiful big leafy greens. In an effort to reduce the volume down to a manageable amount of food that can fit in mini-fridge, I'm taking cues from the French and turning some of these lovely seasonal greens into a quiche.  Quiche can really never go wrong: Crust, eggs, cheese, and hidden veg inside... What's not to like, it's an idiot-proof formula for deliciousness. As such, I hereby pay homage and say mayrcee bow-coop in my best Alabama accent to the Francais for the project I am pursuing with today's CSA bright lights swiss chard and last week's CSA summer savory. 

Ingredients

Seriously, this chard is too pretty.

-Bright Lights Swiss Chard
(err, or any big leafy green like spinach, kale, etc.)
-Red pepper, half of one, sliced thinly
-5 eggs
-Heavy Cream, 1/2 cup
-Cheese of your choice
 (I used 1/3 cup shredded cheddar and goat cheese sprinkles this time)
-Summer savory (this is fancy NY State fresh thyme)
-Pie crust (using whole wheat store bought)
-Salt/Pepper to your taste

  

 Faissez Le Quiche Comme Ca!

1. Preheat the oven to 425F.
2. Saute down the greens in a saucepan in a spoonful of olive oil. I like to add in some salt and pepper right here.
3. Drain the greens in a colander, press out the liquid.
 4. Evenly line those drained greens along the bottom of the pie crust, then layer the red pepper on top of them.

5. Mix up the eggs, heavy cream, summer savory, and any shredded cheese in a large bowl. Pour over the greens.
6. Top off the quiche with some goat cheese sprinkles around the surface.
7. Bake for 20 minutes, then turn down the oven to 375 and bake another 20 min.
8. Bon appetit.

ooey gooey quiche delight.

Spinach Gnocchi + Basil Pesto = I'm delightfully full but my kitchen is a mess.

I got to bragging today at work about that Golden Purlsane Potato Salad, to a fellow CSA member no less. She countered with having used the bunch of spinach in last night's dinner: spinach gnocchi. Gnocchi? You know, that potatoe-y pasta marriage of carbohydrates that comes in an over-sized maggot shape. Mmmmm, maggots.

I love gnocchi, maggot shape and all, but the thought of making it at home in mini-kitchen without robots and conveyer belts and maggot-shaped molds sounded daunting. When I've never made a particular recipe/meal/foodthing before and I can't immediately rattle off what would be all the ingredients (in my mind) and tool set, a large neon DIFFICULT light starts flashing in my brain. OMG, gnocchi? DIFFICULT.

But my perception of gnocchi was about to change. As it turns out, making gnocchi is not as hard as say, discovering the Higgs-Boson particle. How do I know this? Because when you Google "Spinach gnocchi," a Guy Fieri link is the 3rd return. Yeah, that red neck with bleach blond hair who works for the Food Network and plugs Chili's or Applebee's or whatever crappy chain restaurant he works for that is equivalent to eating out of the dumpster, minus the stigma. I contend that anything that dude can cook, I can whip up too (though style points to him for the flame shirt). 

So, as it turns out, apparently, you can make gnocchi at home and don't need some super complex pasta assembly line. But you do need patience. And upon a further bit of googling, I preemptively learned that you need to get the dough consistency correct, otherwise you're liable to make a pile of slimy mush.

Here's what I did to use up my bunch of spinach before it got too wilty, taking cues from my lab mate and amalgamating a bunch of recipes around the web. This makes about 6 servings, so I'm making plenty to have leftovers.

guilt-tripping spinach: "eat me, or i will promptly wilt"

Ingredients

-Spinach, 1 bunch, washed sliced finely
-Potatoes, 1.5 lbs, basically 2 large russet potatoes, peeled cut into 1" chunks
-Onion, 1 medium, 1/2 cut up into chunks, 1/2 fine dice
-Garlic, 4 cloves whole (mashed down to release juices), 4 cloves minced
-Parmesan cheese, 1/2 cup grated
-Flour, 11/4 cups
-1 egg
-1 egg yolk
-Olive oil, 2-3 tbsp
-Salt/Pepper

the basic ingredients. earth balance accidentally snuck in...

Protocol

Prep the potatoes

1. Add potatoes, chunky cut onion, and 4 cloves mashed garlic into a pot, cover with water and bring to a boil. Cook 10 minutes.
2. Drain the potatoes in a colander, but then chuck them back into the hot empty pan for a minute or two. This will help to evaporate any lingering external moisture in the potatoes.
3. Mash the potato/onion/garlic mixture in a bowl. Let cool, then lay out the mixture on a cookie sheet to get further moisture evaporation. You want this mixture to be as dry as possible. While this is drying you can prep the spinach.

Prep the Spinach

1. Sautee minced garlic in olive oil on medium-high heat for 2 min, then add diced onions and sautee another 3 min.
2. Add spinach and cook another 3-4 minutes or until all the spinach has wilted down.
3. Drain in a colander. Press out liquid (you may have to wait for the spinach to cool a bit).

Prep the dough

1. Beat egg and egg yolk in a large bowl. Add spinach mixture, then mashed potato mixture and flour and parmesan cheese. I mixed this all up with my hands along with salt and pepper to my taste.
2. Roll out dough logs with an approx diameter of about 1/2" on a floured counter. I had to use quite a bit of flour to prevent the (very sticky) dough from burrowing its way into every nook and cranny on my fingers.
3. Cut 1" segments of the log. I rolled these nubbins into a ball, then pressed my thumb onto a side to get an over-sized orecchiette look.

Wishing I had a maggot-shaped mold...alas, ear shapes will have to do.

 

Cook 'em up

1. Bring a pot of water to a boil.
2. Chuck in gnocchi balls/ears/shapes, and cook til they float to the top (about 3 minutes).
3. Strain and bathe in cold water for 30 seconds.
4. Enjoy with your favorite sauce or cheese or both...




How I ate them: With a pile of homemade pesto (1/2 cup pine nuts toasted, 2 handfuls of basil, 4 cloves of sauteed garlic, 1/2 cup Parmesan, 1 cup extra virgin olive oil, 1 tbsp salt)--> blended til smooth.

Blurry spinach gnocchi + pesto + a saison brew.  Mmmmmm.

Golden Purlsane Potato Salad: Better than Athlete's Foot Sandwiches.

This week's CSA delivery brought with it something called Golden Purslane. Having never heard of this soon-to-be-in-my fridge veggie, my hasty googling uncovered an interesting little NY Times piece on what is also known as "regelah" or "foot" in Hebrew from a few years back.  Admittedly, the pending arrival of a succulent weed with names that translated to "foot" in other languages, and the fact that it is often the discarded bane of many a gardener didn't exactly get me jazzed.

My natural skepticism had fully prepared me to chuck the "foot" flavored leaves into the "take 1 leave 1" veggie leftover bag when I got to the CSA pickup.  However, I could not in good conscience, orphan a veggie without a sample, especially since it turns out it's a rather cute veggie with leaves, stems, and bulbous little nubbins to boot.

Golden purslane leaves and grape-like nubbins for extra crunch.

I grabbed a quick nibble of a raw, plump leaf only to be delighted by an almost lemony flavored burst of leafy goodness.  The bite was accompanied by quite a bit of flavor, undoubtedly due to the fact that golden purlsane is a succulent, so its leaves are chock full of H2O, which in this case, packed extra lemony punch.  Turns out, though golden purlsane is unlike any green leafy veggie I've ever eaten, it's definitely not foot-flavored (though I'm not fully schooled in the many flavors of foot out there). In fact, it's quite delicious.

So what to do with my lemony foot crunch? My laziness over at the NY Times article presented an interesting sounding link to Russian Potato Salad with dill and purslane.  With a bunch of colorful potatoes around the kitchen, this sounded like it had potential, so I went ahead and threw this potato salad together opting for a Greek Yogurt-Mayonnaise combo base.

 Ingredients

-Golden Purslane, 1 bunch, washed
-Potatoes, I used colorful new potatoes
-Scallions, 2-3 sliced finely
-Mayonnaise, 1/4 cup
-Greek yogurt, 1/4 cup
-Capers, 2 spoonfuls
-Fresh dill, half a handful chopped finely
-juice of 1 Lemon
-Loads of fresh pepper

Potato Salad Protocol

1. Boil washed, chopped up potatoes in water until soft (about 10 min).
2. Mix all ingredients in a big salad bowl. I used only the leaves and nubbins of the purslane and left out the stems which are extra lemony. I think a little stem action couldn't hurt, but beware too much lemony foot flavor :)
3. Enjoy the fruits of your labor.

Extreme close up of the final product.

Afterthoughts

 I love a good crunch in any meal. Onions and potato chips are my go-to essentials when I'm looking for crunch, but the purslane really did a nice job of tricking out the potato salad. I'm quite fickle when it comes to potato salad (or any summer salad with mayo for that matter) - too much mayo or too mushy a texture and I'm likely to trash it, but the amount in this salad is Goldilocks just right, and the purslane offsets the cream base with its mild acidity and crunch.  It might go well with tuna/chicken/egg salad as well, either mixed in, or as the "lettuce" on a sandwich. I enjoyed the 'tater salad as an accompaniment to a portobello burger bathed in blue cheese....mmmm...

Summer delights: portobello burger + 'tater salad.