Now, I do have a confession. I don't like quiche. This surprises me, since I generally love egg but the texture leaves me cold. It is flubbery, flabby and turns my stomach. The problem is, I like the idea of quiche. The pastry, the tasty filling, the side salad, the feeling of healthy yet toothsome eating that is wrapped up in the concept of a quiche - it is light, has a comparatively low carb/high protein ratio, all that good stuff. So periodically I find myself eating (and sometimes even making) yet another quiche and hating it just that little bit more each time I do so. Tarts, on the other hand, tend to be more my cup of tea. It is probably the replacement of egg with cream (and, generally, lashings of cheese), that makes them so appealing. Looking at the recipe, eggs were in evidence but so, and in far greater quantities, was cream. My waistline wouldn't thank me for trying this one but, hopefully my stomach would.
This was a LOT of fun to make. However, that was mostly because it turns out that, if you are an almost one year old, watching Mummy make pastry is the absolute most belly-laugh inducing fun this side of a raspberry to the belly or being tipped upside-down. Seriously. I put Baby Bird in her chair so that she could eat her breakfast while sitting at the table and watching what I was up to - I had worked out that, if I got the pastry done first thing, it could chill in the fridge while I got her dressed and settled her down for her morning nap and then I could do the more complicated and fiddly parts (blind baking and preparing the filling) while she was sleeping. I weighed out the butter and flour and began rubbing them together. She dissolved into giggles. I picked up handfuls, letting it run through my fingers, and every time I did, she laughed some more. This was the funniest thing Mummy had done since I made her toy dolphin turn somersaults in the bath! Not one to miss a chance to make my daughter laugh, I became more expansive and elaborate in my gestures and soon we were both giggling at how much fun making pastry is. While I rolled out the pastry, I gave her a small portion to roll around and squish, figuring she couldn't come to much harm even if she did try to eat it. I let her have a go with the rolling pin. She loved it! If this keeps up, there will be a lot of biscuits and baking in our future.
Later in the morning, with the little one happily snoozing upstairs, I dug out the baking beans, blind-baked the pastry and put together the fillings. This was where I came a little unstuck: I'm still, after two years, haven't entirely got the measure of my oven. I'm fine with cooking stuff. Roasts, casseroles, that sort of stuff tends come be fine. Baking, on the other hand, it a bit more hit and miss. It seems there is a bit of a hotspot on the one side of my oven, so things always come out slightly more cooked on one side than the other - the variation in the pie-crust in the first pic is not due to flash, but to uneven baking - but I always forget to turn them part way through. It is also some form of convection oven that I don't quite understand and so I never quite seem to adjust the cooking time and/or temperature quite enough to compensate for the fact that it cooks faster than a regular oven. I really should sit down and read the instructions properly. Or maybe just bake more until I get the hang of it. Either way, half of the pie-crust looked a little bit overdone after the blind-baking, while the other half looked rather anaemic. Bum.
I pressed on, undeterred, adding liberal amounts of cheese to the egg and cream mixture and hoping against hope that this would indeed be more tart, less quiche.
And here it is - a slice of chard and cheese tart, accompanied by a colourful and simply dressed salad (just a little olive oil and a crack of salt and pepper) and a dollop of raita, left over from the previous day's lamb koftas and falafel. When I sat down to lunch yesterday, I was excited. I was hopeful. It looked great. I gave Baby Bird a small wedge alongside her avocado and cream cheese sandwich and picked up my knife and fork...
It was... quiche.
I sank a little inside. I girded myself to finish the plate and make "mmm, tasty" faces at Baby Bird - I have a rule that we don't describe food as yucky or make gagging faces in front of her if we can possibly help it, so that she doesn't get swayed in her assessment of what is before her (or learn bad habits). I smiled. I "mmm"'d. Baby Bird ate some and seemed to like it. I ate the whole lot and will admit that I didn't hate it, but I can't say I didn't wish I'd had the salad on its own. It was appetising, far more appetising than I usually find quiche, and the chard adds a certain refinement to the cheddar and parmesan, making this a sophisticated slice to add to a buffet or to offer to a gathering of ladies who lunch. I will almost certainly make it again when I have company and, Hubby (who, being a real man, likes quiche) gobbled down a slice for his evening meal just now and pronounced it the best quiche I have made and the nicest one he has had for a while. He doesn't give out praise easily, so I know this was good. But, despite its promise of being a tart, for me it was too eggy and the texture was slightly off. Well, I say that. For quiche the texture was very nice - light, airy, slightly moist in the middle. For me, it was not quite dense and creamy enough. I may yet have a play around with it, and see if I can adjust it more to my liking, but in the meantime, I will be heading back to my fail-safe mushroom tart recipe from Ursula Ferrigno's Real Fast Vegetarian Food, which I have been since university (yes, I was probably not your typical student). No hint of eggy quiche there.
Still, it was well worth the experiment, and was far more interesting to make than a chard gratin or some other side-dish. Hubby has already requested more homemade quiche for his lunchboxes, so some good has come of it.
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