Quiche

The filling for this simple dish is great. Perfect for an easy summer dinner.

Prepare your pie crust in a spring form pan. Preheat the oven to 375.

Quiche filling:

4 eggs

2 cups whole milk (or half and half if you feel adventurous)

1/2 tsp. salt

Pepper to taste

1 shallot finely chopped

1 Tbs. sun-dried tomato packed in olive oil, chopped

1 cup grated Swiss cheese

2 ounces crumbled goat cheese

1/4 pound cooked bacon, crumbled

Spread the bacon crumbs over the crust. Sprinkle the cheese over the bacon. In a bowl, combine the eggs, salt and pepper, shallot, and sun-dried tomato. Pour the mixture over the bacon and cheese. Dot the top of the quiche with butter.

Back for 35-40 minutes, or until the custard has puffed up and the crust is baked. Rest for 5 minutes before serving.

Easy Free-form White Bread

With this recipe for sesame white bread, adapted from Serious Eats, you can effortlessly makes a delicious loaf in an afternoon. The loaf is nice for sandwiches and toast. This recipe has so many things going for it: The bread is delicious, economical, has no added sugar and tastes great for several days. (Of course since it is homemade the loaf has no added preservatives, chemicals or unpronounceable ingredients.)

Two important tools will make this bread easy to bake: A pizza stone and a pizza peel. If you don't have a pizza peel, you aren't making enough homemade pizza! But you can substitute a rimless baking sheet or the back of a baking sheet for the peel.

You cannot buy a bread like this. Make it often! Enjoy!

Ingredients
1 cup warm water
2 1/4 tsp. instant yeast
11.25 ounces bread flour, divided (about 2 and 3/4 cup flour)
1 tsp. salt
2 Tbs. unsalted butter
1 egg beaten with 1 Tbs. milk
Sesame Seeds, Poppy Seeds and Salt.


Combine warm water, yeast, and 6 ounces of flour in a large bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let rest for 90 minutes. Set out the butter and allow it to come to room temperature.

Move racks to the lower third of the oven and place a pizza stone in the oven. Heat the oven to 350. Put a nice wide sheet of parchment paper on the pizza peel and sprinkle with corn meal or semolina flour.

In a small bowl, combine the remaining flour and the salt. With your hand, work the butter into the flour/salt mixture until well combined. Add this mixture to the bowl with the risen dough and combine. Let rest for five minutes.

Follow Peter Reinhart's technique for kneading wet dough. The technique is explained here.

After the last fold in kneading, place the dough on the prepared pan, cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled, 20-30 minutes.

Brush the risen dough with the egg wash and sprinkle with the various seeds and salt. Make one long slash in the dough lengthwise. Slide the dough, still on the parchment, onto the pizza stone and bake for 30 minutes or until the dough reaches a temperature of about 200 degrees.

Cool the bread, then enjoy!

Easy, Delicious Marinated Asparagus

This is a simple method to prepare asparagus - and it's delicious!

The asparagus is blanched for about a minute in a large skillet of boiling water. So to begin, get an appropriately sized skillet filled with water on the stove and start bringing that to boil. Rinse the asparagus and break off the woody stems.

Next, prepare the marinade:

Marinade

3/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 clove garlic, peeled and chopped
salt and pepper


Blanche the asparagus in the boiling water for about a minute. Immediately plunge the asparagus into a bowl of cold water to stop the cooking.

Place the asparagus into a large plastic zip bag, add the marinade, and put the bag into the refrigerator for about four hours.

When you are ready to serve, grate some lemon zest over the asparagus and add a bit of fresh parsley.

Fabulous!

Maple Candy

Maple candy is delicious to eat and easy to make. It doesn't photograph very well, however, so there is no picture here.

The maple candy we buy often comes in cute shapes. I don't own candy molds, and wanted to minimize any fussiness in the procedure, so in this recipe the candy is poured onto a prepared cookie sheet in the same manner that free-form chocolate and chocolate barks are made.

Maple Candy

Line a large cookie sheet with foil. Allow sufficient foil to hang over the two short ends of the pan to create handles. Place a piece of parchment over the foil. Tear off a second piece of parchment of equal length and set aside.

Pour 2 cups of real maple syrup into a large, heavy bottomed pan. I used an 8-quart stock pan. It sounds like overkill, but using a large pan is critical. In a smaller pan, the hot syrup will increase significantly in volume as it approaches the target temperature, threatening to spill over the top. You need to use a good-size pan.

Using a candy thermometer and stirring occasionally, heat the syrup over medium-high heat to 235 F (110 C). Remove from heat. Let cool without stirring until the temperature falls to 175 F (80 C). This takes about 10 minutes.

With a wooden spoon, stir the mixture for 1 to 2 minutes, just until the syrup thickens a bit and starts to lighten in color. DO NOT OVER STIR. And do not stir until it looks like it is the color that you think maple candy should be or you will have a mess that can't be poured.

Pour the candy onto the prepared pan. Using the second sheet of parchment paper, press the candy flat. Using the foil handles, lift the candy out of the pan and onto a rack to cool.

Enjoy!

Carrot Soup

Work some delicious, orange vegetables into your diet with carrot soup. This is a simple recipe using readily available, basic ingredients.

1 lb of carrots, peeled and diced
1 medium onion, peeled and chopped
4 celery ribs, trimmed and chopped
2 tsp curry powder
3 Tbs vegetable oil
2 tsp salt
5 cups vegetable stock
1 Tbs lemon juice
black pepper


In a large stock pan, heat 3 Tbs. of vegetable oil over medium heat. Add the curry powder and saute for 2 minutes.  Add the chopped carrots, celery, onion and salt.  Saute for 10 minutes, stirring frequently.

Add to the pan the vegetable stock.  Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer about 15 minutes, until carrots are tender.

Remove from heat and, using an immersion blender, carefully puree the mixture.  Add lemon juice and season with pepper.

Re-heat to serve.   Enjoy!

Adapted from Soup: A Way of Life by Barbara Kafka

Kneading Wet Dough - Peter Reinhart Technique.

Check it out:



The famous no knead bread recipe from the NYT.

Bread Recipe: Whole Wheat.

Plain whole wheat bread can sometimes seem a bit dull. This whole wheat bread recipe uses a combination of flours, including rye and pumpernickel, as well as nuts, seeds and oatmeal to jazz it up a bit. The flavors from the rye and pumpernickel flours are subtle and add a nice texture to the loaf. Olive oil is used for the fat and maple syrup for a touch of sweetness; neither flavor is intrusive in the final product. This bread recipe is easy to make. Give it a try!

Happy, Healthy, Hippie Bread

Two hours before you plan to bake, combine the following ingredients in a small bowl:

1 ounce flax seeds
1 ounce raw sunflower kernels
1 scant ounce sesame seeds
1 ounce old-fashioned rolled oats.
2 ounces water

Bread

3 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup spelt flour (plus more as needed when kneading the dough).
1 cup rye flour
1 cup pumpernickel flour (also called dark rye meal)
2 packages active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water (105 to 115 degrees)
1/3 cup maple syrup (you may substitute honey)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1 and 3/4 cup water

In a large mixing bowl, combine all the flours together. Slowly stir in the 1 and 3/4 cup water. It will be dry. The point of this process is to allow the flour to absorb the water.

Dissolve the yeast in 1/2 cup warm water in a medium bowl. Let this sit for five minutes. Add the maple syrup, olive oil, and salt. Add all of this to the bowl with the flour and water. Stir (or mix in your stand-mixer) until everything is combined.

Stir in the seed/rolled oat mixture.

Knead the dough until it is smooth and elastic. Add additional spelt flour as needed to get the dough to come together. It will remain a bit sticky due to the rye flour.

Place the dough in an oiled bowl. Turn the oiled side up. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough rise in a warm place until double, about an hour.

When the dough has risen, gently deflate it and turn it out onto your work surface. Divide the dough into two equal halves. Shape each piece into a rectangle that will fit into your bread pan, about 8 1/2 by 4 1/2. With the dough orientated toward you as if it were a page in portrait (not landscape) format, fold the dough like you are folding a business letter. Seal the final fold and gently shape the dough into loaf shape.

Please the dough, seam side down, into oiled 8 1/2 x 41/2 x 2 1/2 loaf pans. Cover loosely with plastic wrap. Let the dough rise in its pans until double, about 1 hour.

While the dough is rising, pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.

Bake the bread for 40 to 45 minutes, until deep brown. Cool for five minutes in the pans. Then remove the bread from the pans and finish cooling on a wire rack.

Enjoy!

Another Menu for a Late Summer Meal

Reading Amy Goldman's book, The Heirloom Tomato, inspired the following meal, which was declared a grand success by all:

• Baked garlic. If possible, choose garlic with large cloves and purchase it at your local farmers' market. Break the cloves from the bulb and remove some, but not all, of its loose outer paper. Place garlic in its remaining paper skin on a piece of aluminum foil, drizzle with olive oil and grind a bit of pepper over everything. Wrap the garlic in the foil and bake at 450 for about 40 minutes.
  

• Baked ricotta cheese with kalamata olives. Mix 3/4 pound ricotta with a tablespoon of olive oil. Grease a shallow, glass baking pan or gratin dish with additional oil. Top cheese with pitted kalamata olive halves, pepper, a sprinkling of paprika, and an additional drizzle of olive oil. Bake at 450 until hot.
  

• Cherry tomato salad. Toss tomatoes with olive oil and a little balsamic vinegar, add salt, fresh-ground pepper, and torn, fresh basil leaves from your kitchen garden.
  

• Homemade French bread.

• Thinly sliced prosciutto purchased from your trusted purveyor of fine Italian foods.
  

• Cold bottle of white wine.