Gracie’s Life Experiment

Evie our 13 month old is getting very picky with her food lately – in particular brekkie. Firstly she refused to eat Weetbix anymore. Now she’s gone off toast as well (nothing I put on it will get her to nibble). This morning at a loss and having only managed to get a few sultanas down her I decided to see whether she wanted scrambled eggs with ham. She wolfed the whole lot down and used her own fork too. Whilst cutting it up it occured to me that it had turned out similar in consistency to a quiche filling and decided that I was going to try and make my own (for the first time eep). As usual trawled the web for ideas of the ingredients – this is what I ended up doing. I didn’t want to make huge quiches and thought it owuld be useful to make small little ones that I could freeze for Evie to have for dinners. This recipe makes 10 ramekin sized quiches.

Homemade Quiche

Pastry Ingredients:
-300g of plain flour
-150g of butter (melted – I usually soften it by blasting for 15s in microwave)
-1 egg
-1 tbsp of cold water
-Pinch of salt

Filling Ingredients:
-4 rashers of bacon (4 UK sized, or 2 Aussie ones which seem to be about a foot long!!)
-1/2 an onion
-1/2 a leek
-350ml of whole milk
-5 eggs
-1 tbsp of self raising flour
-1 tbsp of chopped basil
-1 tsp of nutmeg
-Couple of shakes of white pepper
-10 tbsp of grated tasty cheese

Instructions:
-Put flour in the bowl and mix the butter and eggs into it. I just mash it up with a fork till it’s like breadcrumbs. Add the salt.
-Add the tbsp of cold water, mix and then start to knead it together. If you find that it’s turning out flaky add some more water.
-With my shortcrust pastry I find it very hard to roll it out to use as invariably it tears of sticks to something so I mould the pastry into the ramekins. Using spray oil I grease the inside of the ramekin. I cut the dough into 10 equal sized chunks and push it into the bottom of the ramekin then just press and mould it with my fingers until it’s more or less evenly spread inside the ramekin. Try to get the pastry at least to the top of the ramekin. Also press and squeeze it quite firmly on the bottom edge to make sure you haven’t got it too thick there.
-Leave the pastry in the ramekins aside and make the filling. You can use whatever you like for the solid parts of the filling but in this case I made a quiche lorraine (bacon, onion and cheese) but added leek as well.
-Dice the onion, bacon and leeks then fry till lightly browned
-Sprinkle the bacon/onion/leek mixture into the bottom of the quiche cases and sprinkle some grated cheese on top of the mixture.
-Whisk the egg and milk together with the self raising flour.
-Add the seasonings to the eggy milk (in my case I put pepper, basil and nutmeg – no need for salt as there’s plenty in the bacon and cheese)
-Pour the eggy mixture into the quiche cases – make sure you leave about 1/2 inch of pastry showing at the top as the filling will rise a little when baked
-Bake in oven for 40 mins at 180 deg or until the pastry edge and top looks browned enough for your likings (don’t be alarmed if they start to rise into mounds – mine started to look like flipping souffles, but after they baked and cooled down they went flat again)
-Once cooked let them cool down in the ramekins. Turn them out only when cool (otherwise you may end up with a very hot gooey eggy mess)

So perfect little quiches for little hungry mouths I reckon they’ll also be great for picnics and the like. It was so simple to make and turned out really good (even I was surprised). The Evie monster taste test agrees and she polished off 1/2 of one as soon as it was cool enough!!