smitten kitchen

Come on, be honest. Is there anything better than a homemade quiche? I could eat it with a pile of baby greens for dinner every night of the week. Or lunch, brunch or a post-gym snack. Is there anything more versatile? Oddly enough, I didn’t have a proper quiche pan until yesterday, when a trip to my beloved Bowery Kitchen Supply put me face-to-face with one for ten bucks. (Alex’s favorite kitchen name, ever, is Fluted Removable-Bottom Tart Pan, followed by Reamer. What, you didn’t know I was married to a twelve-year-old?) I was actually there to get my knives sharpened (mwa-ha-ha, it sounds so sinister, right?) and to look at pasta-makers (this excitement for later, but yes, I can barely contain myself, too), and within 2.5 seconds, I knew we were having quiche for dinner.

Unable to decide between Julia Child’s leek quiche and her mushroom variety, I opted instead to use a little of both. She suggests you braise the leeks for 30 minutes with a little butter, water and salt and you should listen to her. Remember those brown-braised pearl onions from the coq a vin? Well, they’ve got competition. She has you cook mushrooms in a way I haven’t before, but it will now be my go-to method for sautéed mushrooms because it was divine: a pat of butter, a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of port, cooked low with the lid on for eight minutes. How does she do that? How does she take something you’ve done your whole life and convince you each time you could have been doing it better because they’ve never tasted this good?

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After a week that felt nothing short of chaotic and angsty, this weekend was just what the over-tangled brain ordered. Saturday, we headed to the surprisingly-empty and orchre-tinted foliage deprived Brooklyn Botanic Garden for a few hours. Still, wandering around snapping up this and that to contribute my quota of flower pictures to the internet was turned out to be exactly the antidote my week called for.

Alas, no day could be perfect without cooking for the people I love, I insisted upon pulling together dinner for my husband and sister-in-law before heading out to see The Prestige. Along with the reheated stinktastic galette leftovers and the best pantry staple, Caesar salad, in some sort of miracle I managed to get my favorite quiche together in under an hour. I’ve been making this spinach quiche for so long, I feel almost possessive of it, forgetting that that somewhere, other people must too, and now I am encouraging you, also. It’s fantastically simple, three everyday cheeses, some green onions and a box of frozen spinach, and keeps so well, it’s actually tastier the next day, with the flavors cool, settled and happily enmeshed. Don’t be put off by its overly-healthy and wholesome appearance, it tastes like a treat and I can’t wait to feast on it with a green salad for lunch this week.

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About five years ago, my best friend decided to host Christmas Eve dinner at her new house, and I came over to help for what seemed like a lovely afternoon, but turned out to be, well, you know how you don’t always get along perfectly with your closest friends when you’re both stressed out? Daunted and nearly pulled under by the amount of work we’d bitten off, I’m pretty sure there were some snippy words between us, and this Wild Mushroom and Stilton Galette recipe didn’t help. I remember thinking at the time it was one of the most elaborate things I’d ever made, but what I really meant was “pain in the ass.” It has all of these, well, steps, directions you’re not sure are utterly necessary or bettering of the end-product but you follow them because you don’t want to find out the other way that you should have just RTFM-ed. Especially not on Christmas Eve with guests coming over. But, we plundered through and ended up delighted with the results. Everything worked exactly the way it promised, and I’d like to think that this galette added an iota of peace and tranquility to our hellish afternoon. Well, that and Baileys.

This dish didn’t reappear in my life until a year ago June at my bridal shower, in the form of a card she’d tucked into a recipe book my sister compiled from guests. I laughed when I looked at it: why would anyone ever make such a pesky recipe again, one cluttered with such exhausted, testy memories? More pertinently, why on earth would I go another round with it on a Wednesday night when I was so tired, even boiling pasta seemed a stretch? It really only sheds further light on my madness, or perhaps denial. Sometimes you really need the exact opposite of what you crave; I mean, my day had been bad enough, why add insult to injury by forcing us to eat an uninspired dinner?

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