{new years quiche}

{pictured above: our 2010 piratey card}
Happy new year! 2010 was a wonderful year filled with climbing, moving across states, concerts, traveling, baking + cooking and adventure. I realize I slacked off the last few months with posts and am making it a goal this year to post regularly. I have several recipes queued up including some lovely celebratory beverages but I wanted to start this morning off with my very first quiche! I've been wanting to make a quiche for some time now and finally, over our holiday vacation, decided to do it. Its a hybrid of a few recipes since I couldn't find anything with the ingredients I wanted to include and I have to say it came out quite perfectly.

The recipe below can be modified to include pretty much any filling. If you don't want as much prep work, leave out the bacon. Without the bacon the whole time should be about an hour including prep + cooking. If you include the bacon, add another 15 - 30 minutes. I loved making this quiche because it was really simple to put together and the results were amazing. You can easily serve this quiche to 8 people or make it on the weekend and reheat piece by piece for some delicious weekday breakfasts. Enjoy!

Pictures + recipe after the jump

{daring bakers: rustic apple crostatas}

The 2010 November Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Simona of briciole. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make pasta frolla for a crostata. She used her own experience as a source, as well as information from Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.

This months Daring Bakers challenge was crostatas or tarts. Tarts are made up of a sweet short crust pastry dough and either fruit or pastry cream based fillings. With Thanksgiving coming up I decided to make an apple tart and since I had no tart pan, I went for the rustic look (which I think adds to the homeyness of it all). I adapted my filling recipe from Joy of Baking and used one of the pasta frolla recipes provided.

It was quite an adventure.

I wanted to serve the tarts on turkey day which meant I needed to assemble and bake these babies day of. I planed ahead with the hostess to make sure there would be space for me to work/bake and discovered she had three ovens! Awesome. I prepped my pasta frolla the day before and brought it with me along with the rest of the ingredients. After rolling out my dough, filling my tarts and folding over the rustic edges, I was ready to bake. I went to place my pan in the oven and what do you know, it doesn't fit! Not to worry, I thought, I'll go pre-heat the big oven downstairs and bake it in there. So, I place my tarts back in the fridge so they stay firm and run downstairs. Since there was no light indicator as to whether or not the oven was pre-heated, I decided to give it a half hour to get hot. Once the time had passed, I walked downstairs precariously holding my tarts and placed them in the oven...which wasn't really that hot but I figured it would be okay. Using my trusty iphone timer I set it for 30 minutes and walked back upstairs to mingle. The alarm goes off. I happily hop downstairs to check on the tarts and what do you know, the oven was warm enough to keep a plate warm and make my dough gooey. Fantastic. So along with some help I try to transfer the tarts to a smaller baking pan...let me tell you...gooey dough does not transfer. Thankfully, a fellow daring baker was there to advise me (and help me remain calm!) to place the pan back in the fridge to firm up again before transferring it to a smaller pan. This worked wonderfully and we ended up having the tarts with the late night turkey day snack.

Despite the bumps along the way, everything came out pretty delicious. I really loved the crust and the filling was nice and lite. I will definitely be making these again as I thought the whole process was actually fairly simple. Thank you Simona for a fun challenge!

See more pics and the recipe after the jump.

{daring bakers: donuts}

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

So, I have taken a couple month hiatus from daring bakers/cooks as work has picked up and I just needed a break. I am back and ready to go for this months challenge and was very excited when I saw that we get to make donuts! It is a rare treat for me to have a donut...typically just walking by a Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts and smelling the aroma is enough for me to gain 5lbs. The only mandatory item for this months challenge was that we make donuts; they could be any flavor, filling, topping we wanted. Lori was kind enough to include a recipe for pumpkin donuts in this challenge and well, I'm all about some pumpkin in the fall. Pumpkin beer, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin bread, pumpkin cookies...if pumpkin is in the name, I will eat/drink it. I have never had pumpkin donuts, but well, they sound delightful. This is the first challenge that on the day of posting, I had both the time and ingredients to put it all together! Also, John was coming home from a week long business trip and I thought it would be a fun surprise to have them waiting for him.

The methods used for cooking the donuts in each recipe Lori gave us was to fry them. Since I'm not a fan of a vat of grease and I wanted to make these as "healthy" as possible so I found some recipes online where people baked the donuts. I made a half batch of the pumpkin donut recipe provided (since it is only the two of us indulging) and found a cinnamon glaze recipe for my topping. Since I had a few chocolate chips left over from making pumpkin chocolate chip cookies I decided to add them to half of my recipe to see how that tasted.

The overall process of making the donuts was incredibly simple. Just keep in mind that you need it to chill for at least 3 hours before baking/frying. My end result...to die for as far as taste goes. I could live off of these babies. They did not however maintain their very puffy rounded shape and turned out to look more like cookies. I blame it on using a cookie sheet instead of with a donut mold. Thanks for a great challenge Lori!

Check out pics after the jump.
To see the full recipes and what others did check out The Daring Kitchen.

{october daring bakers: stuffed grape leaves}

Our October 2010 hostess, Lori of Lori’s Lipsmacking Goodness, has challenged The Daring Cooks to stuff grape leaves. Lori chose a recipe from Aromas of Aleppo and a recipe from The New Book of Middle Eastern Food.

For this months challenge we had to make a filling and then stuff and roll it into grape leaves. A Mediterranean restaurant is the only place I've ever eaten stuffed grape leaves before and I've always thought they were pretty delicious. Never once did I think to actually try making them so, I was very interested to see how this would turn out.

Work has gotten pretty busy lately (thus my lack of posting) so when it came to be the week before our post date, I began to wonder if I'd even be able to participate in this challenge. When a friend of mine suggested we tackle this one together and have a full blown Mediterranean meal, I jumped on it. We each brought our ingredients together in order to make the Wara Einab or Dolma (cold stuffed grape leaves). The men grilled the lamb while we separated, filled and rolled the dolmas. It definitely was a process and one I'm glad to not have done on my own. The grape leaves were a bit fragile as the slightest poke of a fingernail tore them. Towards the end we were double wrapping the grape leaves in order to make a whole one. They turned out delicious though and went very well with the hummus, pita, roasted veggies and lamb.

Check out the recipe and what other daring cooks did over at The Daring Kitchen.

See more pics after the jump.

{daring cooks: pierogi}

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

One of my good friends has been raving about how awesome pierogi are ever since I met her and introduced her to climbing. It seemed like after each climb night she said she was going home to eat pierogi. She was astonished that I had never heard of them or had them before and stated that she had to make them for me. Sadly, I moved before we could set that up so, you can imagine how happy and excited I was to see this months challenge. Finally, I'd get to have pierogi! (kface I've been dying to tell you that it was this months challenge!)

So, what is a pierogi? It is basically a dumpling filled with deliciousness. For the challenge, we had to make the dough and filling from scratch. Pierogi can be either savory or sweet so I chose to lean more to the savory side of things for John's sake. LizG provided a few recipes but said that we should adjust our fillings to include something that represented where we are from. So, my fillings ended up being: twice baked potato, chicken basil pesto and sweet potato. I did manage to sneak in a little sweetness on the last one, but still served it as part of our dinner, not dessert. After all, sweet potato soufflé is usually served as one of the many sides my family consumes during the holidays, even though its sweet enough to be a dessert. I chose these because here in North Carolina, sweet potatoes are a big agriculture product, chicken (which is usually fried in the south) is loved down here, and well, potatoes are just good.

I made a few adjustments to the recipes provided based on what I had on hand and what I could get locally. For the dough, all-purpose is called for but I got away with using whole wheat pastry flour and it came out just fine. I did a double batch of the dough recipe since I wanted to try several different fillings and still had filling left over! Thankfully, this dish is easily frozen and we now have a few bags of pierogi awaiting a night I don't feel like cooking.

In filling them, I found that the potato versions were very easy to do. The chicken version however liked to poke through the dough and cause problems so just a note if you choose to make these with some sort of solid filling. I'd just roll your dough a little thicker to protect it.

Since the recipe made so many, it took a while to fill them all up. I ended up filling what we were eating that night and cooking those first. While they were boiling, I worked on filling the rest. It takes a little time, but for the amount you get, its worth it.

I tried to keep all of the varieties separate from each other so I'd know what I was serving, but after the boiling step they got all mixed together. After boiling them I popped them in a little olive oil and sauteed them up to brown them a bit. This also warmed the ones that had boiled first. I had no sour cream or any idea of what kind of sauce to put them in so we enjoyed these plain. They were delicious! It was kind of like a treasure hunt since we didn't know what we were going to be biting into. John's favorites ended up being the twice baked potato and chicken basil pesto versions. I loved them all.

See more pics and the recipe after the jump. See what other Daring Cooks did here.

{daring bakers: swiss swirl ice cream cake}

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.

Upon first sight of this months swiss swirl ice cream cake challenge, my thoughts were as follows: I get to make ice cream!!! Wait. I have to make swiss rolls as well? Like those little debbie ones I loved as a kid? And then combine it all?! Okay, a kid HAD to have made this up and then an adult just made it pretty...who else would have come up with combining swiss rolls and ice cream but a kid?

So, yes, that was my thought process pretty much exactly. I was very excited to get started so I began brainstorming my dream combinations of ice cream flavors. Strawberry + lemon, blueberry + lemon, mint + chocolate, mint chocolate + coffee, mint + chocolate cinnamon, chocolate coffee + mint...the list went on. I have determined that I will make all of these flavors at some point or another. For this challenge though, I chose to do a chocolate espresso + mint ice cream along with a mint cream filled swiss roll.

It was quickly evident that I would not be able to make this dessert with entirely locally sourced ingredients so, I did the best I could and at least used my own fresh mint from my container garden. My other challenge was that I am a bit lactose intolerant which is very sad as I LOVE ice cream. I do sometimes indulge in the occasional ben & jerry's just to ya know, "test" my stomach out. I savor every single bite and then about 5 minutes later, immediately regret my decision. Thankfully, a friend of mine has the book The Vegan Scoup on her iPad and was able to send me over a few of the recipes I needed to make my concoction. Let me tell you, ice cream is incredible simple to make without an ice cream maker! You just need to have an entire day that you will be home so you can babysit it. Totally worth it in my opinion.

As this challenge had so many components (the ice cream (two versions!), swiss rolls, hot fudge sauce and then assembly which had several steps of letting it freeze for hours) I had to break it down into a several day process so that my brain wouldn't explode. I started with the chocolate espresso ice cream to make sure it would work. It did. I enjoyed a bowl that evening. The following day I made the mint ice cream. Delicious. The green leaves even turned the ice cream a light mint color! I then took a day of rest to build my courage to create the swiss roll as I'd heard too many horror stories with it not working from other daring bakers.

Took another day to build more courage.

Finally got the courage to try it on the 5th day and was very hopeful. I'd read all sorts of tips from others and felt I was ready to face the challenge. Everything mixed nicely and remained fluffy. It baked beautifully. It even came off of the parchment paper without too much trouble. I was feeling very happy and wondered what all the fuss had been about. I rolled it up nicely in my towel and left it to cool for the two hours recommended. A few minutes before it was ready to be filled I made my mint cream filling and then sat down to do my unrolling. It went okay as I unrolled but I noticed it cracking a bit. I figured it was okay and kept on going. Added the mint filling and began to roll it back up without the towel this time and well...DISASTER. A thin amount stuck to the towel and did not come up which caused the cake to crack even worse. Lets just say at this point, the day before our challenge is due, I just gave up and kept on rolling it. Somehow I got it wrapped in plastic and placed in the freezer hoping it would take some shape and allow me to cut it. Thankfully it did and I was able to slice it up nicely and begin assembling the masterpiece.

The assembly process was fairly easy, it just took forever for each layer to freeze. I must say that the end result was absolutely worth the long drawn out saga. The flavors combined delightfully in my mouth and I think I could eat this every day. In the end, I don't know if I'd ever make this entire thing again. I will definitely be making more ice creams, but just not sure about doing the whole thing all over again. Thank you Sunita for an awesome challenge! It was perfect for this ridiculous summer heat we've been having.

Visit the Daring Kitchen for the original recipes and see what others created. Check out more pics and my recipes below the jump!

{daring cooks: nut butter}

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

I was really looking forward to this months challenge of making a nut butter and then using it in an entree So was John. He was ready for a daring cooks challenge that was super savory and this one was it. The challengers gave us several recipe options to use our nut butters in. The nut butters could be made of peanuts, cashews, almonds or whatever nut we wanted. I had just made some peanut butter and as peanuts are easy to get locally, I went with that for my nut butter. You can check out my previous post on making peanut butter here. For my entree, I chose to go with the Asian Noodle Salad with Peanut Dressing recipe. Let me tell you, I could eat that dressing by the spoonful! It was absolutely one of the best things I've ever tasted and paired with the rest of the ingredients, it was wonderful. I highly recommend making this sauce and just spooning it over everything you eat. The recipe made more dressing than was necessary for the dish but it refrigerates well and can be used in a variety of other dishes.

In order to make this dish entirely local, I switched up some of the ingredients to make my own version. I loved how easy it was to make it from all local and fresh ingredients...it really added to the scrumptiousness of it all. The sauce would not have been easy to make using all local ingredients except that I already had the soy sauce, sesame oil, sugar and ground ginger on hand.

Since beginning our locavore challenge, we have run out of noodles so, for the first time in my life, I made from scratch pasta!  I was super excited to give this a try and found a simple recipe over at the Food Network website. It required a good bit of kneading with gave my forearms a workout. I'm sad to say they were even sore the following day! I am so happy I'm climbing again now that we've moved one mile from the climbing gym. I will no longer be shamed by making pasta again. Anyway, I have no pasta roller so this stuff had to be rolled out with my awesome long rolling pin. I think it needed to be a little thinner but my arms were done. The pasta on its own was pretty delicious and a lot of fun to make. I did a half recipe of the pasta since that was all the flour I had left. It made plenty to serve us four times.

To get the original recipe and other options we had, check out The Daring Kitchen.

See my version of the recipe after the jump