You Win Some, You Lose Some

It was a quiche-tastrophe. (Sharyl's comments in pink)

It looked like this: 

But it tasted like this: 

Mom and I diligently followed Ben’s quiche recipe.  Made the crust with all it’s beautiful herbs.   

Mixed up the eggs and other yummy goodness.  Poured it into the crust and popped it into the oven.  It emerged looking beautiful, perfectly set.  We were very excited to try it because it looked so beautiful.  It was like biting into a bunch of very salty grass.  No really.  It was bad.  You couldn’t taste the cheese or the eggs, not even the bacon.  All you could taste was salt and green. (It was a deep dish pie pan and it needed more filling, however, thank goodness we didn't use any more ingredients cause there would have been that much more to throw away)

: (

 We think it is a typo in the book.  The recipe called for 2 teaspoons of salt. (Oh Ben, you Salty dog you)  Together with the teaspoon of salt in the crust and we might as well just dumped the salt shaker on our plates.  I triple checked that recipe.  I did not read it wrong.  2 teaspoons of salt.

 The same day as the quiche incident, we also made a lemon cream pie.  Called for the rind and juice of 6 lemons.  That was way too much. (and Lord knows Deanna and I LOVE lemon) We used an electric juicer and it created  A LOT of juice. (can you say "PUCKER UP" )  Half the lemons probably would have been just right.  Or squeezing them by hand. (The book should have said squeeze by hand because those of us with an electric juicer went overboard)                                            

These are not the Lemon Cream Pie

 We also made yeast rolls like the kind that they serve at Road House Grill.  Our local Road House has sadly closed its doors.  I adore their rolls so I am trying to find a recipe for them now that I can’t get my fix at the restaurant.  Yes, we cheated on Ben.  Get used to it, it’ll probably happen again.  (Good thing we have no hopes of getting a book deal out of this adventure)  Lots of work, with all the rising time.  Definitely not a quick thing to cook, more of an all day commitment.  Anyway, they were very good but not as good as the restaurants.  I’m still on the hunt. (I would like to find a recipe for the yummy biscuits at Red Lobster)

So, in order to redeem ourselves, we had a guest Chick come down and bring her quiche recipe.

My cousin Vickie brought her tried and true recipe down the next weekend and we made 5 (!) quiches. 

They were yummy. (The was about an hour's worth of veggie prep work before we started making the crusts)  Lots of veggies, lots of cheese and lots of bacon! (Holy Quiche Batman!)

Not a lot of salt.  All 5 turned out perfectly. (We could have fed an army)   I ended up freezing the pieces I took home, cut into wedges and wrapped in foil.  For the most part, they held up well to freezing.  But the ones with zucchini and mushrooms got a little soggy. (I ate mine every morning for breakfast, cold, right from the fridge, YUMMY)

Mushrooms, Ham and Cheese

Asparagus, Mushrooms and Ham

Classic Spinach and Bacon

Sorry this took so long to post.  I suck. (Yes you do! HAHAHA)  Actually, you are a very busy Mommy and work and children come first. : ) Up next is Tomato Basil Soup and Angel Biscuits.  That post will be up later this week.

Pie-O-Rama

Posted by Deanna.  Comments from Tisha in orange, comments from Sharyl in pink.

3 chicks, baking.  We can all now call ourselves pie makers. Gotta love how the kitchen smells while we cook. : )

I’ve been a baker for most of my life. Deanna is a great baker. She makes yummy things all the time and lucky for us, she shares them! Cookies, cakes, brownies, bring it on.  But I’ve never made pie crust before because, frankly, it’s a rather intimidating prospect.  The cutting in the cold butter and using ice water all screams “you’ll screw this up!” so I’ve never tried.  Then Ben came along and offered up a foolproof pie crust recipe.  No ice water and no cold butter.  Just some flour, sugar, salt and oil.  Anyone can make this pie crust and it actually turns out to be a pie crust!  Mixing it up was super easy, Lil Chick Z actually made 2 of the crusts mostly by herself. I have made lots of pie crusts before because my Mom taught me how. However, I bowed to her because she made such good ones. She is a legend in her own mind, I mean family, for making an extremely good Lemon Meringue Pie. Both Mom and Dad worked in bakeries and had lots of experience.   

 

And we're rolling and we're rolling

The rolling out took a little trial and error. Roll, Roll, Roll your dough.  We were supposed to roll it out between 2 sheets of wax paper but it actually took about 4 sheets because wax paper is only so wide and the rolled out crust ended up wider than a single sheet. Note to self: invent a wider wax paper!   Then came the flipping and getting it into the pie plate.  Lo and behold, it worked.  I just bought myself a new pie plate (show off)  at Target because I couldn’t find my old one.  It’s a monster size pie plate so the crust didn’t go up and over the rim like it was supposed to but that’s ok, I wasn’t planning on entering the pie into any beauty contests.(Just entering her mouth)

 

Mom, who has made many a pie crust, had no problems with covering her pie plate and getting all fancy with the “fluting” of the edges.  Show off.  Of course, her pie plate was a baby compared to mine, so she had it easy.  We had Papa Bear(D), Mama Bear(T) and Baby Bear(me) plates.

Pricked the crusts with a fork and into the oven they go.  Beautiful golden flakiness emerged to cool on the counter.  Then came the filling.  

Tisha went first with chocolate creamy goodness.  The filling recipe is the same, no matter what flavor of pie you want to make, we just had to omit the cocoa powder if we wanted something other than chocolate.  The filling thickened up pretty quickly and into the cooled crust it goes.  And guess what?  It looked like an actual pie!  I have to admit that this looked and tasted pretty darn good! 

I went next with banana cream.  Left out the cocoa, as I mentioned and mixed in about 3 mashed bananas.  Another banana gave it’s life to line the bottom of the pie crust.  

Lil Chick Z really got into mashing up the bananas

 We decided that I should double the filling recipe because of my massive pie plate.  Unfortunately, that turned out to be a bad idea.  The pie ended up never setting, I think because there was just too much filling.  Or my heaping tablespoons of flour were not heaping enough.  So, I really ended up with banana pudding with pieces of pie crust in it.  Which is not a bad thing, but it’s not banana cream pie.  Next time, no doubling the filling, it’ll just have to have a smaller ratio of filling to crust. More room for whipped cream!! I love this picture of your pie Deanna with the cut bananas at the bottom.  Looks professional! 

Mom made a chocolate cream pie as well. This one set up no problem at all and it was really good
.Of course!  Nice chocolate taste and super smooth and creamy.  Lil Dude G really liked the “chocolate pudding” in the pie crust. Famous G quote " I LIKE chocolate". 

Lil Chick Z used one of the pie crusts that she made to make cinnamon sugar cookies.  She rolled out the dough, sprinkled on sugar and cinnamon and dotted the whole thing with butter.  Then it was rolled up into a log shape and sliced into rounds (Granny helped her with this part).  The cookies end up looking like little miniature cinnamon rolls.  This is not a recipe from Ben’s book, just something from the family recipe vault. Papa LOVED Z's cookies. Guess I will have to make some more : )

Lil Chick Z says:  "Hi, I made these cookies out of pie crust.  They were easy to make.  They taste good."  She really got into helping us this time, much more than ever before.  

The end result.  Yummy! 

Next time, we'll be down a Chick.  But never fear, we will carry on.  We'll be attempting quiche.  Oh my.Lions and Tigers and Quiche, OH MY !!  Tisha has decided that she needs a vacation (from us) so is going away for a week. Lucky girl!! We will try to persevere without her but she shall be missed. 


We are finding that cooking can be fairly expensive when just doing it by yourself. We are splitting all the ingredients 3 ways, so we can try new things that might other wise be too expensive to prepare on our own. Having said that, none of this has been overly expensive, just different ingredients than I usually have at home in my cupboards. I have made a Ben's Shelf  to put all the things that we use when preparing Ben's recipes. Did I mention he is OUR MASTER CHEF??  HA HA HA  Great fun ladies!  Enjoy your quiche next time!