Make a Summer Quiche

Certain foods go with certain seasons, and when the late-summer garden is bursting with cherry tomatoes and sweet peppers, it's time to make a summer quiche.

I like making quiche because it's never the same dish twice. And I love cooking with produce I've grown meself. 

Things I don't grow meself: Pie crusts. I use Pillsbury's rolled up ones, even though I swear they shrink them every time I buy them. Barely enough dough these days to pinch a tiny frill on the edge. Pfft!  Think we wouldn't notice, Doughboy? 

Put a fresh crust in your favorite pie pan, then get to sauteeing! 

Those little sweet snack peppers that come in a zip-top bag at the grocery store are true to seed. I figured that out about four years ago when I took a leap of faith and planted some seeds from the grocery-store ones, and got darling little sweet snack peppers in my own garden. Pick or get a bunch of those and chop 'em up. Add some minced poblanos (green) for heat and color. Sautee up with chopped onions in a blob of butter until they're tender, and the onions are clear.  Set aside.

Toss some chopped Sungold cherry tomatoes in the pan. Cooking with Sungolds is wonderful. They're like little flavor bombs, bringing intense, rich, sunny tomato flavor to anything you make, be it quiche or stir-fry, scrambled eggs or soup. I miss them so when frost comes!

In tonight's quiche, I added tomatillos. One brave tomatillo volunteered this year, right where last year's plants had been. Despite the severe drought, that one plant has made dozens of fruit, small but tangy, which are begging to be used wherever cherry tomatoes are used.

The fabulous tomatillo/Sungold slurry:

With onions and peppers...

Moosh 'em down with a potato masher and you have a flavor-packed base and binder for your quiche. These somewhat unexpected ingredients are what make this a Summer Quiche.  Put that slurry in your unbaked pie crust.

Add generous handfuls of whatever cheese you have on hand. Sharp cheddar, mild cheddar, Monterey Jack, Asiago, even a smattering of feta! All cheese is nom. Mixtures are nom nom.

If you wish, toss in some fresh spinach. It'll cook down in no time. And then you can call it Quiche Florentine, which sounds so nice.

Over it all, pour a mixture of 2 cups whole milk (a bit of half and half won't hurt, either) and 3 eggs, beaten well together.

Salt lightly, and season with fresh herbs from the garden. I like to use rosemary, sage and thyme. Grind a little fresh nutmeg into the liquid pie and slip it into a preheated 400 degree oven. After 10 minutes, cut the heat to 325 and bake until golden brown on top (about 50 min. total).  You're supposed to serve quiche lukewarm. It slices better then. We usually can't wait.

Touch the top lightly, make sure it doesn't jiggle too much. It'll set up more when it's cooler. 

Yep, the clock says 10:22 pm, but I wanted to make a quiche for the morning, to say goodbye to my dear friend Mario Cordoba, who has been visiting from Costa Rica. It's been a joy to have him here taking in all my favorite places, getting to know my little family. If food be love, and I think it is, he's been well-loved.

How lucky can you get, to be able to show your friend your favorite places, to see them through his wondering eyes?

 Ahh, I miss him already. But I'll see him in February, when we take another lucky band of 12 sojourners on a natural history romp through Costa Rica.  That ought to take the bite out of winter.

**Alert readers will notice that there are a bunch of different ingredients going down here, and no spinach in the final quiche. These photos are from several different Summer Quiches. Really, this post is just meant to encourage home cooks to branch out and throw a bunch of different stuff in your quiches, to see what happens. Cherry tomatoes and tomatillos are the only real twist here. Quiches can be anything you want them to be. I've had a Village Bakery quiche stuffed with carrots and beets and it was delicious! So toss the recipe out and have fun!

New Things in the Garden

So we've established that I like summer and autumn. Not so wild about the time of dying back, everything croaking. So I'm going to talk about what I like.

What I like is poblanos on the plant. Not storebought. I bought a single poblano plant, potted, for $6.95 this spring, just on a lark, and I bet I've gotten $60 worth of those exquisite big peppers off it this season. The plant is waist-high and about 5' across now. What a deal! Oh, how I hate to see it die. But I've saved its seeds...for it is a champion among pepper plants. The peppers are fairly hot when eaten raw, but they mellow out nicely when cooked, and add a distinct flavor and bite to everything. And I put them in almost everything. Sometimes I put too many of them in. Then everyone turns up their nose. I gamely eat it all.

Overkill, Poblano style. Each one the size of your hand!

There's a fine harvest of sweet snack peppers and fat firm tomatillos this year, too. YUM. From utter ignorance, I am now the world's biggest tomatillo fan. Who knew? 

Like little citrusy green tomatoes in paper husks. So tasty. They cook so well, and add special flavor to everything.

Only two of my six plants made it. Will definitely grow more next year. I throw them in all my soups, chilis, quiches, vegetable medleys, stir fries and lately on homemade pizza and sliced thin over salad. Tangily, citrusly delicious! Tomatillos are in the nightshade family, like tomatoes and eggplant. They're somewhere in between the two--pulpy, a little crispy, with a fresh tangy green tomato taste that adds so much, especially when cooked. Out of this world when sliced thin and put on homemade pizza like green pepperoni. You can use them in salsas, and I suppose that's what most people do, but since I quit eating chips I no longer make salsa. Sigh.

Another surprise find of the summer: the cucamelon, Melothria scabra. Native to Mexico, where it's called Sandiitas de raton or "mouse melon." Thought to have been cultivated long before colonial impact. It grows on a dainty little climbing vine with maple-shaped leaves. It tastes like a slightly limey cucumber, without a hint of sweetness, and has an impressive, nay, epic! crunch. Terrific on salads and in fresh salsas for texture, crunch and flavor. 

The vine takes no room at all--it just goes straight up, is tiny and delicate. You'd never think you'd get much off of it, so weak and spindly it is, but the yield is nice.

Cucamelons are not large. Grape-sized. Such fun to eat and give away.

 Probably the crunchiest thing I've ever grown, including sugar snap peas. And it would make a fabulous dollhouse watermelon. We call them Barbie watermelons around here. Because they're the perfect size to put in a Barbie doll's hands. I need to do that photo shoot. But I have no Barbie.  Phoebe wrapped her Barbie completely up in toilet paper and buried her I know not where when she was about seven. She said she was making a Barbie mummy. Yeah. You go, girl. High use for a Barbie. 

So I've grown a few things I've never grown, and they were all winners. I like plants. I like experimenting with them. I like giving them to friends, sharing seeds, getting and giving recommendations and sharing the results. 

The other huge success were the orange and red sweet snack peppers I grew from seed. Just took seed from the little grocery store ones that come in Ziploc bags and started it in the greenhouse. Next spring I'll start it earlier--maybe in March, because my plants were festooned with fruit at frost. And they grew true to type!! There are almost no seeds in them and you can eat three or four before you can stop yourself. But why stop? High in vitamins A and  C and a lot better for you than cookies. They're deliciously sweet and crispy, thick-walled and juicy. Highly recommended. Here's His Lordship Tim Appleton, MBE, exulting in the crunch of a sweet snack pepper while floating... temporarily... at North Bend.

and of course I love my little darling Sungold tomatoes. I throw them in all my soups, chilis, quiches and stir-fries, too.

The garden, she was very good to me this year. I loved every minute of harvesting and eating our own  lettuce, Swiss chard, snap peas, beans, tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos and cucamelons.

I'm already looking forward to starting next spring's seeds. I'm going to start those snack peppers, tomatillos, cucamelons and poblanos EARLY this time. And I'm going to figure out where those dang chard-eating bunnehs are getting in. Right.