Pioneer Woman: Quiche and Scampi Part I

I know what you're thinking, and no, we did not eat them together!  I had not gotten to either dish earlier in the week as I had planned, and I had all the fresh ingredients going bad.  I decided that yesterday was as light a tutoring day as I would have and it was just as easy to cook both recipes as to cook only one.  Besides, having the quiche ready for breakfast this morning would be a nice treat. 

Quiche 

Verdict:  Delicious.  A big hit.
Cook it again:  Absolutely, but with some minor modifications
Cost factor:  A little high, but that's the nature of quiche.  Heavy cream, almost a pound of bacon, 7 eggs, cheese and artichoke hearts made this a costly little dish, but a wonderful treat.

The ingredients.  As with all my ingredient photos, I left a few things out.  In this case, it was the garlic and onion.

I hardly made any revisions to the PW recipe, because this was my first quiche.  But I did make a few revisions:

• I didn't have as much swiss cheese defrosted as I thought, because I may or may not have eaten some this weekend as a snack.  I admit to nothing.  But I ended up with only about a cup of swiss ready to use, so I added about a cup of cheddar.  (I say about because I didn't measure it, just scooped based on eye.)
• I didn't have the time or inclination to make a pie crust yesterday, so I used a Pillsbury crust.  We actually use them pretty regularly here, and I think they're pretty good -- flaky, flavorful, and what's not to love about pie-crust-in-as-fast-as-you-can-open-the-box?!  In the future I plan to try Ree's pie crust from the cookbook, but yesterday wasn't the day.  Plus I'd seen some of my cooking club compatriots say that they used two pie dishes, and this allowed me to have a spare crust on hand just in case.
• I was also too lazy to take out the mandoline.  The recipe calls for thinly-sliced onions, and this is as good as I got by hand:

• The recipe says to cook up the onions, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, etc. and let them cool for 20 minutes, but I started this quiche with exactly 50 minutes before I had to tutor, so in an effort to get everything mixed and in the oven on time, I took the veggies from the saute pan to a plate.   When I absolutely had to move along, I just mixed them into the egg mixture slowly to temper it.

The veggies cooling on a plate. 

 Overall, this recipe is very easy to make, but we didn't have a deep tart pan, and even an "emergency" Williams-Sonoma run was fruitless, so I ended up using the deepest pie dish we own.  As you can tell from the photo below, it wasn't quite deep enough!  Because there are so many goodies in the mix, it was hard to separate it "fairly" into two pie pans, so we just spooned out a little of the liquid, cleaned the dish and baking sheet, and threw it all in the oven.

I said in the summary that I would absolutely make this again, but with some modifications.  What are they?  Great question!

First, I don't generally cook bacon in a skillet anymore -- I almost always cook it in the oven.  Now that I saved the bacon fat from this recipe, I'd just use some bacon fat to flavor the veggies I was sauteing, and cook the bacon in the oven. It gets more evenly crispy and my entire stove and counters don't have splatter everywhere.

My unused bacon press.  Seriously, we cook in a skillet so infrequently these days, I forgot about this until it was too late.

Second, I definitely plan to find a deep tart pan, and might even try to hit the commercial cooking shops in Atlanta this weekend.  I felt awfully wasteful draining away the cream/egg mixture, and I don't think that I could evenly distribute the veggies between two pie dishes, so a bigger dish (or reducing the recipe to 3/4 of its current measurements) is going to be my solution.

But otherwise, this is downright delicious and Mick and I are quite thrilled with the tasty (and filling) product!

Sorry for the downright terrible lighting in this photo.

--Jen

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