fancy quiche

 

There are these young women online here and there who like to dress in Little Women attire, and who share their old-fashioned crafts and recipes. It's very interesting. They seem to want to embrace a home-centered and healthy way of doing things, or maybe they want to escape modernity for a while. But I've seen quite a few.

Anyway, I made a quiche recipe today from one of these sites, and it was very good - more work than the usual quiche I make, since I tend to use already cooked things like leftovers in mine, but it's a holiday and I enjoyed making it. I had most of the ingredients, and substituted another cheese for the one in the recipe. The big thing is, I made a butter pie crust according to her recipe.

I learned to make pie crusts in junior high school, I believe. That would mean I was just pre-teen. My mother never was good at it. Of course, they taught me to make it with Crisco, and that's what I got used to and what I did for years, until it became known it was unhealthy stuff. Then I switched to an oil crust.
Since then, I've not been able to crimp the edges, or do anything to pretty it up because oil crusts are soft - at least, the recipe I use is. 

Today I decided to make the butter crust, and it was just as easy as I remembered: I floured the counter and just rolled the thing out! No rolling it between sheets of waxed paper, and then gingerly peeling it off, hoping it won't tear. 

before crimping

Anyway, I should just start making butter or lard crusts from now on, unless I don't plan ahead - I keep butter in the freezer. 

Basically, for this quiche I cooked up a package of bacon, and mixed it with some sauteed onion and garlic, with thyme and oregano, nutmeg and pepper. That went onto the rolled out crust. Then, the asparagus: a half pound, which had been boiled till crisp-tender. Half of this got chopped and dumped into the pie crust. Then, one cup of cheese. I didn't have blue cheese, so I used half goat crumbles and half shredded cheddar, with some dry mustard to make up the loss of tang which blue cheese has.  The cheese, in the pie. Whisk up seven eggs with three quarter cup of heavy cream, and a pinch of salt, and pour over all.  Bake at 375 for 50-55 mins., and then lay the rest of the asparagus on top of the quiche, which was sliced lengthwise and bake another forty minutes or so. Enjoy!