A Quiche Fiasco

I still have leftover baked chicken breasts and two boiled corn cobs, carrots and chicken broth et al so thought I might use my new French onion soup bowls to make chicken pot pie. I love it with puff pastry on top so picked some up frozen this morning. No, I don’t make puff pastry. My hands melt the butter and I don’t have the patience for six turns and all that rolling.

Yesterday I wanted something different so bought a small commercial ham and coated it with grainy mustard and honey before baking it for an hour. Today, I thought, why not make a quiche with ham, and try to fudge the puff pastry into being a crust?

I rolled out a sheet of pastry, cut it 1″ larger than the base of the very expensive 9″ tart pan that was recently purchased, and laid in the pastry. I cut a sheet of parchment into a round and lined it with “pie weight beans.” Baked for five minutes and the sides receded precipitously. Removed the parchment and beans, docked it, and baked five minutes more and it came out flat as a pancake.

While cooling, the base became flatter but in some places I had less than 1/2 inch for filling, and had spent the baking time making the filling.

So Jim went to the store and bought two frozen pie crusts. Don’t you just love him? I blind-baked one and filled it with leftover ham and Emmenthaler cheese, a few chopped chives, sprinking of Parmigiano Reggiano and my own custard and baked. It was tasty. Leftovers will be even tastier for breakfast. I served it with an endive salad with sherry vinaigrette, which I enjoyed as it provided a counterpoint to the richness of the quiche. Jim didn’t think so. I’d intended the endive for a salad with beets and roasted pecans, where the sweetness of the beets and crunchiness of the pecans would have mitigated the spiciness of the endive. The pastry debacle precluded the time needed for the roasting, cooling and peeling of beets.

For a guy that only knew iceberg lettuce and learned to love Caesar salad, endive is a long and torturous journey. Jim doesn’t like my homemade vinaigrettes and prefers bottled Ranch or Thousand Island dressing. Yes, I have my work cut out for me but years to do it. As for today, I learned lessons about pastry and endive, and us. Thanks, Jim!

Tomorrow I have to learn how to use the new video software. Jim wants me to do short cooking videos, which means my upper kitchen counter can no longer be a repository for mail, receipts et al… That’s the challenge. Keep cooking! Dee