Living Greener: Quiche a great way to use left overs

For some reason, people today think of quiche as a swanky, fashionable dish, served in extravagant, artsy restaurants.

In reality, though, quiche is one of the most basic and simple of dishes. Once you make a few quiches, you quickly realize that the dish can be adapted for whatever you have on hand – all it needs are vegetables and eggs.

Milk, cheese, and bread dough are preferable but not necessary. If this week your garden has produced too many courgettes, or you have some meat that needs to be used, well, it can all go in the quiche.

To make a quiche you should have a baking pan. Mine is porcelain and about 24 cm (9.5 inches) across, which is about the right size for most store-bought short-crust pastries.

Start with this recipe and then get creative:

One short-crust pastry sheet: you can buy them in most groceries or even service stations. 

Puff pastry dough or filo dough will not work as well.

200 grams of cooked spinach, with almost all the juice drained out.

Four eggs 200 millilitres of milk or cream 

100 grams of cheese 

1. Defrost the short-bread pastry. You can do this by leaving it out for a few hours, or by putting it in the microwave – but if you do the latter, keep it on low and only for a minute or so at a time, otherwise you’ll burn the dough and melt the plastic in-between.

Once the pastry is defrosted, unroll it slowly and tuck it into the pan, so that the entire pan is covered but no dough is hanging over the side. If you are trying to put a square roll in a round pan, simply take off the corners and tuck them in the gaps.

2. If the spinach is from a can, squeeze out the juice and put the spinach in the quiche. Make sure all the bottom of the pan is covered, but not up to the rim – you want the vegetables to form a layer in the quiche, not a mountain rising out of it. Make sure there is no juice rolling around in the bottom.

If you want to cook the spinach yourself, it’s simple: Wash the spinach gently but thoroughly in cold water – grit often sticks to spinach, so wash it more than once. Sautee some onions (see Sautee Onions) and once they are golden-brown, throw in the spinach on top and stir them together.

Put the heat on low and put the lid on the pot – or a plate, if you don’t have a lid – and let it simmer until the spinach is soft. People often over-cook spinach, so be careful to take it off the heat just after it softens. Then, squeeze out the water and put the spinach in the quiche pan. Again, drain the juice well, cover the bottom of the pan, don’t mound it all up in the middle and so on.

3. Grate the cheese over the spinach, trying to cover it evenly.

4. Slowly pour the mix over the spinach, moving around the edge of the pan as you pour, trying to cover all the spinach and cheese. (PICTURE) 5. Turn on the oven to 170 degrees Celsius, and clean up the dishes for five minutes as you wait for the oven to warm. Put the quiche in the oven, being careful not to touch the sides of the oven.

30 minutes later, check the quiche. It should swell slightly in the middle and be turning golden brown on top. If it’s not, check again in five minutes, and then five minutes after that.

VARIATIONS

 If you want a denser, more solid quiche, put in less milk or add an egg yolk. If you want it lighter, add more milk or more egg white.

We haven’t found quiches to work as well with root vegetables (carrots, turnips), but other people may disagree. It’s your meal – you try things and find out what you like.

Use common sense, of course: kale or broccoli need to cook longer than sorrel and spinach. Try adding peppers and tomatoes in your quiche as well.

This recipe is vegetarian, but many people add bacon, ham or even fish. In fact, that’s the secret of quiche: it’s an elegant-sounding, delicious, nutritious way to disguise leftovers.