Bringin you back to some Quiche love

Today is your lucky day, people of the world wide web. I've decided to dust off and re-post a dear old favorite blog post. Easter is three days away and I can't help but return to my very first adventures in the land of quiche-making. This year it's coming to you a couple days early so you can make the most of it as Sunday approaches. Enjoy.

how to save a quiche April 2009 

 

I'm writing this post in honor of tomorrow being Easter, for which many of you may be making quiches of your own. The following advice can be applied to any kind of quiche. Broccoli/cheddar/bacon, Asparagus/mushroom/swiss, you pick it. I don't know what you people put in your quiches.

Let's start with some helpful preventative tips, so you don't have to master the art of saving a quiche.

preventative tip #1: It is NOT necessary to read the instructions on the pre-shaped, frozen crust you bought. Trust me on this one. Just go with your gut. Throw the insides of the quiche into the pie crust (which comes in a nice little pie tin) and just bake that sucker.  

If you decide to ignore my preventative tip #1 (shame on you), you’ll need preventative tip #2: The pie crust instructions will tell you to remove the crust from the pie tin it comes in. Again, go with your gut (you know you feel like you should leave that crust in that tin). Do not discard the tin. It will not blow up in the oven (you may have considered this as a reason Marie Callendar is trying to get you to remove the tin).

Ok, last preventative tip is coming up here. When all your ingredients are INSIDE the pie tin with the exception of the liquid eggy mixture your recipe calls for, mind preventative tip #3: You DO NOT have to use ALL the liquid eggy mixture your recipe told you to make. If your recipe says something like “Make sure it doesn’t overflow,” you should make sure it doesn’t overflow. When your eggy mixture starts to kind of almost overflow, STOP POURING. The truth of the matter is, you might just have to throw a good bit of that stuff out.

If you followed these helpful preventative tips, you and your quiche will probably end up looking something like this:

If you do not heed this preventative advice, you and your quiche will probably end up looking a little more like this:

It’s going to be ok. Don’t panic. You’ll probably be thinking, “Should I just eat this quiche for dinner? Can I even serve this at my Easter brunch tomorrow? This is no quiche. It’s a quichish blob with tin foil all stuck to it. Did the quiche blob swallow up the crust?”

Now this rescue-desperate quiche is never going to look quite like quiche #1 (shown above my rescue-desperate quiche), but there are steps you can take to make your sorry quiche servable at tomorrow’s brunch. Here we go:

Step #1: Let the quiche cool. If you need to walk away from the quiche, that’s ok. If you need to nibble a little bit of the quiche to make sure it tastes better than it looks, go ahead. But be sure not to nibble too much or your quiche will look slightly deformed after you save it.

Step #2: When your quiche-blob has cooled a bit, try sliding a (preferably) stainless-steel pancake flipper underneath the crust, without ripping the tin foil (if you didn’t use tin foil, you won’t have to worry about potential ripping).

Step #3: (this is the most difficult step) Grab a friend, husband, or other trusted individual who can help you, and who knows what a quiche is supposed to look like. As a team, slide the pie tin under the quiche-blob, simultaneously lifting and maneuvering the quiche-blob into the tin.

Step #4: Squish any outlying pieces of quiche-blob into the pie tin so that the quiche-blob begins to look a little more like a quiche. Let sit.

After successfully completing these four steps, you and your quiche should look like this:

After all of this you should give yourself a pat on the back or have your trusted individual give you a pat on the back, because you saved your quiche. It is now safely contained in a pie shape, and you can serve it at your brunch.

avril

Well it's finally April. The dead of winter is over and this year spring really feels like spring. Ok, well spring hasn't really sprung just yet and I hear April is an especially wet month here in Chicago. But this year the changing of the seasons is uniquely coinciding with a whole lot of new and different in my life.

We're coming up one one year in Chicago this July, which makes it feel like a legitimate home. I've felt settled in and connected here since pretty early on, but being able to count ten months between moving in and now is concrete proof to myself that we've actually been here a while. I like it here. The Midwest is my true home more than I ever could have guessed and Chicago is growing on me all the time. And I'm thoroughly enjoying that can't-wait-for-summer feeling you can only get in a place that experiences the sub-zero temperatures of the Dead of Winter.

I'm finally beginning to hear back from graduate school programs. I didn't get into UIC, but De Paul accepted me and I've got faculty interviews at Rush in a week. It's incredibly exciting and a bit surreal to think of myself in NP school this fall.

Our lease will be up in July and Jeremy and I will move out of our neighborhood. We like our apartment and our landlord is wonderful, but we're excited to leave Wicker Park in hopes to find a more diverse, lower income community we can be a part of. Lately we're spending lots of time perusing pad mapper, analyzing all kinds of Chicago maps, and going on neighborhood reconnaissance treks with our friends. We're also entertaining the idea of buying something. Our dream life includes us buying an old (late 1800's-early 1900's) stone three or four flat building to live in and rent to some of our friends as well as local neighborhood peeps.

In other very EXCITING news, my siblings-in-law Josh and Bex Mann have finally arrived to the states with their baby girl, Mercy! It's funny. It's not like we get to see them or even chat with them much while they're in Oregon, but it feels so good to have them back in Salem! Maybe it's just knowing they're a quick, easy, good connection of a phone call away that feels so great. We got to chat with them on the phone the day after they got home and it was so refreshing to hear their voices. I don't think I would have known before they took the step, but it feels so wonderful to have parents and a baby among this generation of Manns. I'm so thankful for their new little family, and I am so looking forward to taking notes as these two incredible people raise a daughter.

I could write about a handful of other wonderful things I'm looking forward to and excited about, but this should do for now. So thankful to be alive!