Baking clubs and forays into quiche

I'm now in a baking club! (that is, I was as of yesterday. They may have fired me when I did not complete first challenge on time)

Once a week I will bake a recipe selected by the host of the week, take photos, taste it, and write up a review on my blog with a link the that host who will have the full recipe on her blog. This is all supposed to happen every Wednesday. Obviously, it is Thursday.

This is the cookbook we are using. I LOVE this book! It comes from my favorite cooking show of all time and, not to give too much away, this has my favorite pizza recipe ever and I'm going to choose it for my week!

FYI: I will give a briefing about the recipe but, as I was not crazy about this one, it will be brief :)  Next Wednesday is bran muffins, my favorite thing in the breakfast world, and I'm sure I will wax on and on about that one.

Yesterday's recipe was Quiche. There were several ways to vary the basic cheese quiche. I chose a pepper jack/jalapeno variety that I hoped would burn my taste buds off so I would not be able to taste the quiche-y part. It needed more jalapenos.

Things have been a little crazy over the holidays and with shopping, reading, watching movies, playing games, sleeping until noon, lollying in the bath for 3 hours every night, and eating treats, I could hardly be expected to find time to bake a quiche. As you can imagine, Wednesday rolled around and I was completely unprepared to move back to Orem, start classes and work, bake a quiche, and blog about it all in one day!!

Fortunately, I have seen Semi Homemade with Sandra Lee. To simplify my life, I bought a pie crust from the store. Fortunately, L has not yet acquired so many friends in her new complex that she does not have time to hang with me. L came over and put the crust in the mini muffin tins.  Unfortunately, the recipe does not use the instructions for baking refrigerator pie crust and mine burned. Though not wanting to appear ungrateful for my assistent, I also must add that unfortunately, L's rolling out of approx half the mini pie crusts left something to be desired, as there was no place to pour my filling in the resulting biscuits.

The filling was easy, it took three minutes. I only used about 2 Tbsp however, and had to pour most down the drain.

I baked that quiche to death, then let it sit for 10 minutes.

And now, it was time for a taste..........not too bad!

So by this time, it was only 7:00. I thought, how fantastic, I will post about this tonight, no problem. I go to get out my camera to take a photo. Of course, it was dead. I undo the masking tape that was holding it together to take out the battery and attempt to charge it. All the while, I'm texting O on my stone age phone to see when he will be home to take a photo with his smart phone. Every 5 minutes I would take the battery out of the charger and tape in back into the camera, all to no avail. I only needed one picture, I needed very little power for that! I began to think a) maybe the battery was truly dead, b) maybe my tape arrangement was not a good one, and c) perhaps I needed a new camera. Really, anyone looking through the window would have thought they were watching a period piece.

As an aside (and one that I have been working up to this whole post) I am not completely out of this tech world. I got an ipad from O for Christmas! (I opened it and he said "now, you are cooler than me".) It just dawned on me, as I typed that in, that I should have just taken the photo with the ipad! Next week, I'll do that.

Anyhow, O eventually came home at 10 to take photos of my tiny egg cups. However by that time, I was moved to rant on and on about some random topic while vacuuming my carpet and blasting the Ting Tings. When I glanced up and saw it was 11:00, I raced to get ready for bed (I have a fear of early a.m.s and I had class at 8!!). I collapsed in bed to hear that O had not only forgotten to bring his toothbrush back from my parents, but he had also forgotten his package of Costco toothbrushes I got him for Christmas! Of course this led to me screaming that I hate him for keeping me up. I'm sure you can picture O delicately stepping to the door, confidently stating that he would just look for a toothbrush in the front room. Magically, there were toothbrushes in the front room :) Following that whole episode, I had to go on and on about how I did not truly blame him for keeping me up (which was an absurd accusation). O was most gracious in accepting my apology and assuring me that he was not concerned about it. Of course during the course of my apology I noticed Winston Churchill's top hat reflected in O's eye and I knew that he was really just placating me so I would go to sleep and he could get back to Winny. In the end, I did not get my blog post done and I did not get to bed until after midnight! I was happy to be back in my king bed though. I must say, when I stand straight I seem a manageable enough size but when I lie flat, my limbs flap around quite a bit

So, in summary:
I am extremely picky about quiche. Raw eggs give me a terrible fright and whenever I bake an eggy dish I get a little nervous watching the jelloid form jiggle in the oven. When I heard we were doing quiche I thought, perhaps I'll be sick this week. But, I really wanted to be a full participating member so I got myself in gear.

I was worried that it would be hard, quiche seems gourmet. It was very easy, took little time at all (but perhaps it will take a little more time if you do the crust correctly). The only hard part was judging when it was done. I doubled my cooking time to avoid salmonella, that may have been a tad on the extreme side.

Overall: It was the best quiche I have ever eaten. There is a 1 in 10^8 chance that I will make this again. (I used scientific notation so that not everyone will know just how badly I have offended the recipe.)

If you want to see the full recipe (and if you like quiche I wholeheartedly endorse this one) check out this blog: tylerandclare.blogspot.com

Until later