Summer Squash, Bacon, and Mozzarella Quiche, Cooking Light July 2011
Heirloom Tomato Chow-Chow, Food Network Magazine July/August 2010
I thought it would be nice to make this quiche so that I could have leftovers for breakfasts this week. I ended up de-lighting it though, using all butter for the crust (instead of butter + shortening), the bacon grease to cook the squash in (instead of EVOO), 1/2 c cream, 1/4 c buttermilk, and 1/4 c water (instead of 1 c 2% milk), and 5 eggs (instead of 3 egg whites plus 3 whole eggs). And I cut it into sixths instead of eighths.
I also deviated in that I started cooking a little late (after finding some lost keys and spending a while trying to figure out how to track down the person. In the end, I took them to the nearby gym since there was a member card on the keychain, and they were able to look the person up to contact them), so instead of cooling the dough in the fridge for an hour, I basically just rolled it out immediately and then chilled it while waiting for the oven to preheat. I feel like normally in crust there isn't a chilling step? You just use cold ingredients and ice water. In the end, the crust wasn't super great, but I don't know if that's because of my full on butter, not chilling it, using my hands instead of a food processor, OR possibly the fact that the filling was too much and overflowed, so instead of the crust being on the outside of the quiche, it was sort of buried inside. Oh well. It tasted good, although it seemed like there were some bites that were super salty and others not so much. I'm not sure if I didn't mix the salt into the eggs well enough, or if it's just that there were certain deposits of mozzarella (which is pretty salty, right?) instead of being evenly mixed in.
I must say, I'm pretty proud of the number of dishes I've found this week to use up the fresh thyme. I think this is the third recipe this week that has called for it. In the first couple months of the blog I used to purposefully put recipes together if they called for the same perishable ingredient, but I haven't been doing that lately, so normally I just have to buy things like cilantro every week and then not use all of it :-P
So, the quiche was good. The chow-chow was not. I was not sure if it was going to be tasty, so I only made 1/4 the normal amount (and it is still definitely more than 1 serving...). I used mustard, tumeric, and then just pickling spice (instead of a combination of pickling spice, celery seeds, and mustard seeds). As it was simmering, it just started making the air awful, so bad... to the point that I had to look up mustard gas to figure out whether boiling something with mustard is what makes it (it's not, luckily). Actually, I think it was the vinegar that burned your throat. I was pretty sure that I shouldn't let it simmer for the entire 15 minutes, and even so after throwing in a test tomato for a couple minutes I realized that it was still way too strong. I poured in some water to dilute it before putting in the rest of the onion and tomato slices.
In the end, it was still quite strong. It was pretty spicy, I guess just the pickling spice I have has a good amount of pepper flakes in it. I don't know... it was an interesting flavor, and I could see why someone might choose to make and eat this, but the vinegar and the pepper were both just so strong. Interestingly, there's a different version of chow-chow with the same name (except missing the hyphen). It's by the same chef, also on FN's website... but the ratios are pretty different. Namely, there is only 2 c vinegar instead of 4 c. And instead of pickling spice, it just has the same other spices plus some cayenne directly. I wonder if this recipe would have been better.
I don't think I'll keep either recipe. The quiche was good, but I already have other quiche recipes, and it's easy to mix-and-match what goes inside. And the chow-chow I will never make again :-P But, I guess it's good to have tried it! That's what's nice about a cooking challenge-- you get to try some random things you would never have otherwise made.
July's best recipe: Probably the lemonade drumsticks
four cups of apple cider vinegar with tomatoes sounds like too much. No wonder your lungs were afire. I have never heard of chow chow before
ReplyDeleteChow-chow is apparently a very common dish in the South, judging from the reviews on the recipe. They seemed to think it was just fine. :-P I only used a single cup of cider, since I had a feeling it would be weird and I didn't want to make four servings. As it was, I ate the tomatoes but then eventually decided I would rather throw away the remaining onions than eat them. :-/
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