When I am thinking about what to have for the evening meal I will have a look at what we are growing and see what I can come up with. Sometimes it is a case of “we have eggs, and we have silver beet, hmmm, quiche!” Most of the other stuff for the quiche we have hanging around so it is no biggie to toss one together and then have it with salad or veggies. One good thing about the following recipe is that the leaf component doesn’t have to be silver beet, it can just be a leaf veg of some description or a mixture. I made one (the one in the photo actually) a few weeks ago that had silver beet, spinach, kale, sorrel and rocket in it. There was probably other stuff I could have thrown in if I’d thought of it!
If you haven’t come across the whole “impossible” bit before, it is just that you throw everything together and then bung it in the oven to cook, rather than making pastry, blind baking it, adding the filling then re-baking. It makes a quick, easy and tasty feed.
I make them vegetarian but you can throw in a bit of bacon or sausage to meatify it if required. Other veggie stuff can be added alter the flavour as well and I regularly toss in some corn niblets and/or diced capsicum, how much you add is up to you.
Recipe
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 brown onion, chopped
4 eggs,
1 1/2 cups milk
1/2 cup self-raising flour
1 cup grated cheese (We use mozzarella but I suspect anything would do)
1 cup of shredded mixed leaves(silver beet, spinach, kale etc.)
1 pinch of salt
Method
Caramelise the onion in a saucepan with the olive oil (I didn’t realise how this one step improves the flavour of the dish so much!) and allow it to cool.
Add the milk into a bowl and whisk in each of the eggs in turn
Whisk in the self-raising flour and continue whisking until the mixture is smooth and lump free.
Whisk in the salt and add in the cheese.
You can wilt the leaves first in a frypan if you like it that way but I don’t bother, I just arrange the chopped leaves in the bottom of a 200mm pie pan then pour over the whisked mixture and bake in an oven at 180⁰C for 45 min or until browned on top.
We sometimes use the solar oven to bake quiches and we have a thin walled black enamelled steel pie plate which we use for this purpose. The black steel absorbs and transmits the solar heat much better than the ceramic pie plate we would normally use in the gas oven. Also, it pays to preheat the oven (solar or otherwise) as it helps to release the quiche from the pan. I apply some release agent (butter or marge) by wiping it onto the bottom of the pie plate just to be sure anyway.
