Happy New Year!

To all those observing, or at least taking note of the Jewish New Year, L'shanah tovah!
I had my apples and honey earlier before dinner, so hopefully the new year will be prosperous. I suppose the good thing about being religious is that I don't have to go to temple tonight or any other night, but I do get to eat. I thought about buying some matzoh ball soup but it's still too hot for soup.

I was excited to see that honey crisp apples are out now, so I bought 2. They really don't need to then be dipped in honey since they taste so good already, but such is the tradition. I also made myself a quiche, which cooked up very nicely I have to say, except for the sad fact that it was pretty boring. I used Colby cheese instead of cheddar, so it lacked bite and I also didn't have any lemon for the broccoli, so overall the taste was a bit dull. I think a bit of chipotle sauce or some bbq sauce or something would help a bit. The broccoli did come out perfect though, and beautifully green. I had too much milk and not enough egg so although the whole thing cooked well, there was a lot of extra liquid. Oh well, maybe eventually I'll get this quiche thing right.

Quiche Number Two and Grandma's Sauce

Somehow my quiche posts seem to coincide with pasta. Actually, I just haven't gotten around to the pasta post until now.

Last weekend I decided to finally make grandma's sauce. Every Italian family thinks they make the best sauce, but obviously mine is right. There's not a lot involved in the recipe but it does call for a 3 hour simmer, so I have been putting it off. I found a pretty neat Italian supermarket recently and so I had purchased a bit of chopped sirloin to make meatballs with. Unfortunately it sat in my fridge for a number of days so I had to toss some of it. The rest I made in to very makeshift meatballs. I forgot to buy breadcrumbs so I mixed up Parmesan cheese, parsley, egg and some bread that I toasted up in the pan quickly, together with the meat. It had a little trouble holding its shape, but it wasn't bad tasting. I fried them up in a pan and then put them aside to go into the sauce at the end. I was worried that the meat I had cooked also went bad but it turned out to be just fine. The sauce is pretty good, somehow not as good as grandma's, even though I fried up some garlic to put in it. It is nice to have some decent sauce now.

Today, quiche is the name of the game. I've had a crust in the freezer for quite a long time and finally decided it was time to use it. I also froze my excess collard greens from a few weeks ago and it seemed like a good experiment. Once again, I didn't quite have the right ingredients so instead of milk and/or yogurt I had milk and sour cream. Same principle though. The collards are a new twist as well.

I fried up some garlic and onions and just for fun I put in some fake bacon for more flavor. The fake bacon doesn't really get crispy, which is really the only issue, but it still adds a nice flavor. I guess it's sort of a twist on quiche Lorraine.

The big problem is still with the crust because it's not a very good crust. It got stuck and kinda broken and its a bit freezer burned maybe. Otherwise, it cooked well, the sour cream was a success, the quiche has a smokey sort of flavor, which is a bit of a change from my normal quiche. This is much more of a quiche win than last time!

Quiche, Fail? Pasta, Win?

Quiche is one of my favorite easy to make recipes. My mom developed a nice recipe from a cookbook she had and I've used it a number of times. The typical quiche involves broccoli and cheese but we've both modified it a few times to include spinach or other things like tomatoes. I've made it several times at college without any issue, but I tried to make it the other day and had an interesting result. The recipe states that you can use either milk or yogurt or a combo of milk and yogurt. I was intending to just use milk but I had so much yogurt I decided to use a mix. I realized I had no measuring cups but I did have a cup of yogurt to which I added some milk.

I'm not sure if it was the oven or the yogurt ( though I've used yogurt before) but it came out a bit messy. The top was completely brown, more so than it really should have been, but the inside was still really liquidy and soft. I gave it a little extra time in the oven but I was afraid the cheese would completely burn. It got a little less runny but it still wasn't quite right. Since I feel ok I'm assuming I didn't give myself food poisoning. Hooray. I'll see what its like after a few days in the fridge. I think this oven just is way more powerful than anything I've ever used. The stove top gets hot so fast and is quite seriously hot. I somehow managed to burn the green beans the other day when I steamed them. I think there must have been something still stuck to the pot because green beans shouldn't turn a pot black.

Oh, and I also used completely the wrong pie crust. Not deep dish and it was very dessert like instead of something that might be savory. Oh well.
On to the success story. I realize pasta is pretty well impossible to mess up, but I'm still proud of my little pasta dish tonight. The pasta itself was obviously easy and I did have a jar of the lovely Victoria sauce, provided by my parents, but ( mom should be proud) I wanted some protein with my pasta. I had bought ground turkey earlier in the week so I made little turkey meatballs and fried them up in a pan with garlic and onions. Then when they were mostly cooked I put them in the pot with the sauce and let it all heat up. And then voila! Pasta with even more delicious sauce and turkey meatballs.
Thank you very much, I'll be here all week.