Green, Eggs & Ham

While I am on this whole pie kick I decided to try out something else that I've always loved but never attempted making myself: Quiche. It was never something that intimidated me much, it was just something that I would get around to later. Besides, most people put some kind of stigma on quiche. Its like people either love it or they've never tried it...because 'real men don't eat quiche'. Kyle being one of those real men, that had never tried it but didn't hesitate to tell me how gross it was when I said that's what I was making for dinner. After informing him what I was going to put into it though, he agreed to give it a shot. I was going to go with a plain broccoli cheese quiche but then I found a good chunk of ham in the fridge that needed to be used up so I decided to chop that up and throw it in too.

Lets start with the crust:

Same recipe as last time, the only difference is that I pricked it a bunch of times with a fork and baked it and cooled it before I filled it to avoid a soggy crust. Apparently this process is called blind baking. I was supposed to use pie weights so that the crust didn't shrink, but I don't have any, and I didn't have any dried beans to use as a substitute. Some other suggestions included coins or heavy metal screws and washers...but I thought that would be weird, so I opted not to have any weights on it at all. They say that if you put enough holes in it with the fork then it won't shrink much, so I took my chances and it turned out just fine. I baked it for about 15 minutes at 400 degrees then let it cool completely before filling it.

The filling was a lot easier than I expected. 3 eggs, 3/4 C milk and 1/4 C half and half, (because that's all I had) salt and pepper. I read something that suggested pressing the grated cheese into the bottom of the crust rather than mixing it up with the filling because they say that's another way to avoid a soggy crust. It creates a little bit of a raincoat. So i pressed about 3/4 C grated sharp cheddar cheese into the bottom, emptied a bowl of chopped steamed broccoli and diced ham into the pan and then covered it with the egg mixture. Super easy.

I didn't get any pictures of this part of the process though because I was on the phone, which is also my camera.

I lowered the oven temperature to 375 and baked it for about 40 minutes. They say that the very center should be a little jiggly when you pull it out and that will carry-over cook while you let it cool. I wasn't sure just how jiggly it was supposed to be, so I erred on the side of less jiggly because no one wants to eat a runny-egged quiche, especially when I am trying to make a good first impression with it.

  

Here it is fresh out of the oven. I let it sit for about 20 minutes before slicing into it, but at this point I thought it looked pretty good. 

And here we have the finished product: green, eggs and ham. Its basically an omelet encased in a pie crust, I don't know whats not to like. Kyle even ate all of his and said it was pretty good, so there you have it, real men do eat quiche.