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!

Garden Gifts

The birthday post goes on. All this stuff happened on my birthday. I'm counting blessings. I think I hit 14 in the last post, and they were things I saw out my window as I worked. Toward evening, I headed to the garden to pick some dinner, and it hit me how many gifts it's pumping out, at last, after all the weeding and mulching, the staking and coddling and the minimal watering I've done. 

It is truly amazing how fast a tomato can grow when it decides to take off. Remember, they were all frosted to sticks on May 10 and 11. Amazing! Helps to support them well, with cages and heavy-duty stakes. Dang, that's a good plant. The Sungolds are in, and the Cherokee Purples and Mr. Stripeys have already blessed us with about six BLT's. MMMMM. Mmm, mmmm! #15. My favorite sandwich anywhere, ever, is a homegrown tomato BLT.

The peppers didn't like the mid-May frost much, either. I had to go out and buy plants after all my seedlings, tenderly grown in the greenhouse, died. Waah. But here comes a golden Baby Bell! I like Bonnie Plants. They get results fast, and they're well-grown, with a nice selection. All hail Bonnie!especially when frost takes yours. Gift #16.

Tendergreen beans are in and they are sooo delicious. #17.  I had to pick again right before I left for Arizona. I finally got smart and planted only two rows at once this time, with the third row (foreground) planted a couple weeks afterward. That way I'll get more tender young beans just as the first two rows peter out. Last spring I went nuts, planted four rows at the same time. And I remember declaring, "I will be buried in my own beans." A bean is a wonderful thing.

Every year, things volunteer in the garden. Cherry tomatoes, of course, but most of those get pulled up, because none are as good as my Sungold hybrids. I had a mystery plant come up right where my tomatillos were last year. I was suspicious of it, because it looked so much like a nightshade, but I let it grow, as there was something tomatilloey about its leaves and flowers. Still wasn't sure about it...

It got bigger and bigger.  Ye gods! If this isn't a tomatillo, what is it? I kept checking to see if it was fruiting. Nope. I decided to let it continue to eat real estate and cow manure until I figured out what it was. Maybe it was a wild ground cherry, and I hear they're edible, too.

Finally got my answer on my birthday! They're tomatillos!!! Inside that husk is a marble-sized green fruit, and when they get big and burst the papery husk, I'll be throwing those into quiches, stir-fries, salads and soups all summer long. Not to mention eating them right off the plant. A little green tomato with firm flesh and a citrusy tang! Love tomatillos! If you've never tried growing them, you must. Vital ingredient in salsa too. To have one of these hot-weather plants volunteer in my garden seems a very extravagant gift. And it's JUST HUUUUGE. #18!! with a bullet.

In a sweet bit of irony, the most valued volunteers in the garden actually germinated just outside it. I started growing tomatillos and cucamelons in the spring of 2013, when a friend sent me seeds for both. Look at these four cucamelon plants, which took root in the soil at the base of the garden planks. I found them as I was hand-pulling crabgrass along the boards. The tags and terra cotta are to protect them from the occasional weed whacking.  Funny how plants make you remember people. Cucamelons and tomatillos come unbidden, spring up like thoughts, volunteering, popping into my garden just as thoughts of my friend pop into my mind.

Unlike random thoughts, these unbidden visitors bear fruit. A tiny cucamelon forms, its yellow blossom about to drop off. If you're curious about cucamelons, type it into the search box in the upper left corner of this page. You'll get several posts about these tiny crunchy wonders, by far the crunchiest thing I've ever grown. Also called "mouse melon."  #19.

Gift # 20:

Tuberoses!

It's going to be an incredible tuberose year. I've been dividing the bulb clusters and planting them singly in rows for about a decade now, and they've responded by multiplying like bunnies, like my friend Gordon says. He gave them to me ages ago, just a brown paper bag of them, after I swooned when he put some in a vase by my bedside when I visited. And now I give them away.

I have enough to plant absolute windrows of them--this one by the heirloom bed of asparagus, of  rhubarb from North Dakota and golden raspberries from Connie Toops. It looks like every one of these plants is going to spike up and bloom this year. August and September are going to be something, my friends.

This year, we cut a bunch of sumac that was shading the heirloom bed, and I dumped two top-dressings of cow manure on it, and oh my. Stand back! I dug a little trench, put cow manure in it, added tuberoses...

Come August, this lovely member of the agave family will start pumping out the tubular white blossoms and their intoxicating evening scent. One blossom will perfume a bedroom.

More tuberoses, by the garage, and a Thunbergia (black-eyed Susan) vine that couldn't live in a pot any longer. Cow manure, cow manure. It's the new drug in my happy sanctuary.

Another testimony to cow manure: this gardenia. As of late April, this plant had barely a leaf on it, thanks to a non-watering event combined with a red spider mite invasion. I apologized to it, gave it a bigger pot half-filled with aged manure, and am now reaping the rewards.

It's so incredibly beautiful, with four-inch flowers, that I brought it into the studio for perfume, and to escape the 98 degree heat outside. It's thankful, and so am I.  That's Gift #21, and they're still coming.

I'm in Arizona right now, speaking this weekend at the Sedona Hummingbird Festival. Took Shila along, tacked on three days for exploring, and we're having the time of our lives. Needless to say, this "working" trip feels like a great big vacation.  This is one of the most glorious places I've ever seen.  Thankful.

photo by Shila Wilson

How Goes the Greenhouse?

I promised I'd let you know how things go in the greenhouse, as it recovers ever so slowly from the devastation of the November 23, 2013 freeze. This photo's pretty symbolic. In the foreground, a budding Christmas cactus. I bought it in bloom in December, when I desperately needed flowers. It obligingly dropped them all, and all its buds. Oh, thank you. But then after sulking for a couple of months, it made  more buds, and these have carried through beautifully. Flowers.

 In the middle, a little rose-pink Abutilon I ordered from Logee's that makes me very happy. And in the rear, the huge vigorous leaves of a theater-curtain red geranium that was killed to the soil by the freeze, but somehow sent up a shoot. Yep, this photo says a lot about what's gone on in the greenhouse since the event I refer to as the Apocalypse.

Pulling back a bit, here they are in context. And there's the scarlet tanager-red stellar geranium that I was sure I'd lost to the freeze. It came back. The blue lobelias volunteered from seed, after the freeze, in the pot of what was once my huge tangerine orange hibiscus. Now represented by one shoot, on the right margin of this photo. But that shoot has some tiny buds on it.

Fireworks!! Color and life and beauty, once again. So hard-won, so longed-for.

The gardenia my sweet reader "Diana" sent, blooming in ones and twos, perfuming the whole place. We've been fighting red spider mite, and we're winning. The top bud opened today. Sooo intoxicating.

As is my dear Jasminum sambac, "Maid of Orleans," who lived through the freeze, sprouting from dead-looking sticks. Ahhhhhh. She's far better than before.

Chetty takes it all in, sniffing the perfumed air. He likes to help me clean the place, sweeping and scrubbing, and rearrange the plants.

I can't believe that this tiny Ruby Red grapefruit tree is doing what it's doing. Because it set too many (about a dozen), it aborted a handful of fruits,  but the four that stayed on are growing by leaps and bounds. Wow!! I imagine it laden with full-sized grapefruit and smile.  And it burst into bloom again, and made some new leaves! I think it likes me. It smells so sweet. I love this tree!

The big lumpy 25-year-old Mammilaria, perking along. I love this hardy old plant, too. 21 degrees ain't nothing to him. Been there, done that. The desert is a tough place. Your greenhouse is a walk in the park, freezes and all.

I was gone for 12 days and this marvelous flame-crested creature, here listening to a favorite tune from "Mulan" on her Macbook Air while she soaks up the sun, watered all my plants and twiddled the heater dials as conditions required. Not only that, but she enlisted sweet Liam to help her bring every last one of them inside before the temperatures dipped below zero again. "I was sick of worrying about what might happen if the gas went off or I couldn't keep them warm enough. So we brought them all inside." 

You can't buy or even wish for kids like that. You have to make them, raise them so they love all the same things you do. It's partly luck, partly magic, all miracle. We're blessed. 

The seedlings thrived under her care: tomatoes, tomatillos, cucamelons, peppers, and Swiss chard.

The tomatillos burst into bloom!! Well, who wouldn't, with Phoebe loving on you?

The greenhouse is back. And I feel each bud bursting into bloom inside me. The sun's heat races through my veins. 

Come on, Spring. Do it. 

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.