smitten kitchen » Tarts/Quiche

over-the-top mushroom quiche

deb — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:33:01 +0000

This one is personal. Four years, five months and 19 days ago, I was bested by this quiche and as noted by the detailed date count, I may not be over it. Worse, it wasn’t even the quiche that bested me, but the crust. A flaky shell with even more fragility-enhancing butter than a standard pie dough, it was twice as big as a regular quiche shell, and then, instead of letting you press it into a shallow tart pan, it was draped inside the towering (okay, three-inch) walls of an open-hinged 9-inch springform ring. Without a base. This crust takes no prisoners and my 2007 take — a slippery, torn-up, leaky shell that only held half the quiche batter and dribbled much of that, too, onto the oven floor — was nothing to write home about. Not that this stopped me; this is, after all, an Internet Weblog.

I finally got back to it last week and here’s the point in the story where I’m supposed to tell you that four years later, I won. In the Smitten Kitchen vs. Thomas Keller’s Buttery Quiche Shell smackdown, Smitten Kitchen prevailed. Take that, commenter who said “you know, this IS a Thomas Keller recipe so it’s not meant for the casual home cook,” and that “some things should be left to the pros.” Alas, I’d totally not seen and patched the tiniest of holes in my shell and a small amount of filling dribbled out. And then a huge chunk fell off the crust as I was trimming it. I did it to keep it real, okay?

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zucchini and ricotta galette

deb — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:51:02 +0000

I realized this week that it has been way, way too long since I made a galette. I remember being infatuated with them when I launched this site, uh, wow, hey, did you know this site is almost four years old? When did that happen? I was absolutely not paying attention. It’s kind of like when I was hanging out with the baby yesterday evening and he up and crawled over to the coffee table and pulled himself up to standing and, whoa, when did that happen? Who taught him that? Could you unteach him that, please? Thank you.

I digress: galettes! My galette obsession began with a wild mushroom and blue cheese galette a friend and I used to make every Christmas. It is unbelievably good, it will always be welcome, anywhere. Have you made it yet? You should. I moved onto a roasted butternut squash and caramelized onion galette the next fall and oh man, I would not kick that out of the kitchen for eating crackers. That’s how the saying goes, right? The next winter was all about Eastern Europe, with a cabbage and mushroom galette with chopped hard-boiled egg, dill and greens. I bet you didn’t know a little tart could be so filling, huh? And then, tsk-tsk, I apparently stopped making savory galettes and it’s such a shame because what each of these has in common is a crust so amazing, you will not believe it came out of your kitchen. Seriously. When I made it again yesterday and I was not sure I could tell it apart from store-bought puffed pastry. I’m not bragging, it’s a fine, fine recipe I adapted from an old Williams-Sonoma cookbook.

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blue cheese and red potato tart

deb — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:31:17 +0000

I bought the prettiest little “freshly dug!” (I could not resist this sign) red potatoes at the market last week. They’re sweet, creamy and cute and need almost nothing to make them welcome on any table — roasted with olive oil, salt and pepper or boiled until tender and tossed cold with a vinaigrette, they’re heaven.

But if I were the kind of person who even knew when to leave well enough alone, what would we ever have to talk about? And so I sifted around my endless lists of things I think I might want to cook and landed on what has to be the most pretentious recipe I’ve ever read. I’m know, I really should just focus on the positive (and I will, soon) but seriously: instead of water in the pastry crust, it calls for San Pellegrino, and instead of butter, it calls for Plugrá, an ultra-creamy European butter. Here I had been operating under the assumption that the goal of recipes were to encourage home cooks, not discourage those who don’t keep imported Italian mineral water around for pie doughs, silly me. Harrumph!

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cauliflower and caramelized onion tart

deb — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:26:37 +0000

I realize that — short of admitting that I dislike most flourless chocolate cakes and hamburgers generally don’t do it for me — this is going to be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever said but here it goes anyway: sometimes I forget to taste all of this delicious food.

I get busy, you see. Sometimes it’s because I’m bringing it to a party and it gets decimated upon arrival, before I even get a bite or a photo. (See also: S’more Pie.) Sometimes it doesn’t finish cooking until it’s really late and night and I’m full from dinner and forget about it until the next morning and it’s really not breakfast food. (See also: Coq au Vin) But most of the time these days I’m juggling baby while trying to edit photos and jot down notes while willing the baked good to cool so I can cut into it and sometimes, the star of the show ends up hanging out lonely on the counter, wondering if everyone up and left for the party without it.

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quiche lorraine

deb — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:32:31 +0000

So, I’m cheating. I really wasn’t planning on cooking just yet. You see, I spent a whole lot of the last few weeks of pregnancy honing in on cookbooks that focus on simpler, but uncompromised cooking (and I will absolutely do a post on these, soon), bookmarking the kind of recipes I could imagine assembling with one hand tied behind my back (or you know, holding a squawking newborn) and even banking a decent amount of recipes, such as that date spice loaf and the stuffed eggplant, and a few other things I have even told you about yet. And I don’t need to cook either: Our fridge is filled with homemade matzo ball soup, spaghetti and meatballs, endless bagel fixings, pickles galore, fruit, sandwich bread, lunch meats, milk for cereal and you name it (did I tell you our families were awesome or what?). Do you hear me? There is no reason on earth that I need to be pulling down the pots and pans right now. And yet I did. Because there was something — one tiny thing, perhaps — that I had not anticipated when I mapped these early weeks out in my head.

I am so freaking hungry.

Here’s the thing: When I was pregnant, I never had a huge appetite. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. Trying to figure out what to eat was an exacting process, to say the least. I’d eat perhaps half of whatever I had in front of me, and listlessly push the rest around the plate. I tried to woo my tastebuds with beef empanadas, migas and pasta but I have to confess: none of it did anything for me. It kinda blew.

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tomato and corn pie

deb — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:35:58 +0000

Let me tell you about something that always happens, and it’s the best thing, ever: A month or so ago, a reader emailed me and asked me if I’d ever tried a tomato pie. No, not the Italian-American tomato pie seen in New York and New Jersey — a thick, bready pizza dough slathered with sauce and broiled with Romano cheese on top then served in squares — but a Southern thing, baked in a pie shell. Where I’m from, “tomato pie” is the Italian-ish thing I’ve described it above, thus I responded that I’ve never heard of it before and added “but mark my words, not two days after I send off this email, I will have heard about it three times.”

Sure enough, tomato pie is everywhere this summer. I’ve seen a version from Paula Deen, Elise has a version up at Simply Recipes and my good old August Gourmet magazine — as packed with an impossible level of late-summer inspiration — adapts Laurie Colwin’s (remember her? We love her.) and James Beard’s (remember him? We love him.) nearly 20 year old version to include market-fresh corn, and updating the crust with a biscuit-like dough.

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onion tart with mustard and fennel

deb — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 20:59:53 +0000

More than six months ago, I had a dinner party and auditioned a then-new recipe for one of my favorite middle-of-the-freezing-winter dinner party dishes (short ribs) that was so good, I still weep a little when I recall it. I made a tarte tatin that was… well, it needed a little more cooking, and perhaps a Molly intervention And I made this onion tart, and we ate it with the cheese “course” and it was perfect in every way.

So why are you only hearing about it today? Well, as is all too common when I have people over, I forget to take pictures. Any pictures. I have not a single picture of either dish from that night. I am still not over it. I have brought shame to the food blogger community.

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cabbage and mushroom galette

deb — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 01:17:15 +0000

I don’t think I have ever met a galette I didn’t like. In fact, my only grievance is that I do not have more galette recipes on this site. Two years ago there was a wild mushroom and stilton galette and last year there was a butternut squash and caramelized onion galette but since then? Nada. Let me serve to fix that right now.

Why am I so obsessed with galettes? Halfway between a tart and pizza, I think they’re easier than both. They don’t require any of the eggs or liquid-setting bake of a quiche and there’s less of a volume limitation than you have with pizza, where too many ingredients will send your toppings right onto the oven floor. The galette is perfection, and I am excited to add this one to the collection.

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spinach quiche, revisited

deb — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:58:55 +0000

The strangest thing has happened to me this summer; my obsessive pining for the next new recipe has waned. Gone are the days when the thought of cooking something I have already made was enough to make me not cook at all. Instead, it seems that this site is finally working for me: I have an archive of recipes I adore, largely ones that work as they should, and the answer to “What should we have for dinner?” is now, quite frequently, “Ooh, those kefta meatballs were so good. Let’s have them again!”

Eager to break the routine of working and eating by myself nearly every single day since I began freelancing this summer, I had a friend over for lunch on Friday, but I also had a lot of work to get done that day. Was this the time to make that new savory tart I have been eying for the fall? No. Was this time to go to the store and buy more stuff, when our refrigerator was already brimming with the remnants of our North Fork farmers’ markets finds the weekend before? No.

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mushroom strudel

deb — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:27:37 +0000

I am not proud of this, but I’m really just a one trick pony in the language department. Sure, after four years of high school French and the shortest exchange program ever, I can get by in Paris and because of this, can occasionally make sense of written Italian or Spanish, but Czech? German? I couldn’t be further from makings heads or tails of it.

As you might expect, as Alex and I luckily found ourselves at some untouristy eateries in Vienna–without a waitstaff that catered to the language-deficient or menus reprinted in 16 world languages–quite a bit of Hilarity Ensued. After many hours of walking on a hot day, Alex and I were beat, so we flopped down at a cafe and mindlessly asked for “iced coffees” completely forgetting that “ice” equals “eis” equals “ice cream” in German, and ended up with a big cup filled with coffee, cream, whipped cream and a scoop of vanilla gelato. I wish all mistakes were this tasty!

Looking to offset the heavy dishes Central Europe, I also ordered something that I guessed was going to be a light, healthy vegetable strudel, something I’d imagined dreamily warm with crispy, flaky edges and something I was certainly going to want to repeat at home. Unfortunately, I received a brick of rice with a few flecks of carrots and parnsips, wrapped in phyllo and smothered in a creamy herb sauce. It all went very well with my eis Kaffee!

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