Sausage Mushroom Quiche

The Chief Taster requested quiche, ostensibly because I had accidentally bought two dozen eggs in one day (we went to a lot of different markets that day, and they never got marked off the list.  I accept only partial blame) and she thought we should do something that used a lot of them.  Quiche uses four eggs.  Pound cake uses five.  Had she known this, I would have written a vastly different entry today.

We also had some mushrooms left from the braised short ribs she made yesterday (I was still dishing mine out in the kitchen when I heard her yell “oh my god, this is amazing!!”  She was not wrong.) and some sweet Italian sausage left over from general purpose usage in the freezer.

We’ll get to the quiche itself in a moment; first, let’s address the crust.

Mom’s sister and my dad each independently gave me the same recipe for pie crust.  I love them both, and have always been impressed with their culinary capabilities (Dad’s chicken pot pie is killer; the aunt is known for her pies), but I’ve never been thrilled with the results I get from that recipe.  Instead, I usually use the recipe from the Betty Crocker Culinary Compendium, which is identical to the family formula except that it calls for solid vegetable shortening (Crisco) instead of vegetable oil.  I think it gives a better texture to the finished pie crust, and I’ve found it easier to handle.  The advantage to the family formula is that you don’t need a pastry blender.

I ran into trouble when I found out halfway into the crust recipe (without enough time for another grocery run today) that I didn’t have enough shortening.  I needed ⅓ cup plus 1 tablespoon; I had ⅓ cup plus maybe a teaspoon.  I went with it.

Even after adding the 3 T water called for in the recipe, the dough still hadn’t pulled together as well as I had wanted, so I added about a tablespoon of oil.  That helped the doughball I had to gain enough cohesion to pull in the crumbs left in the bowl.  I let it wait in the fridge while I prepared the filling, and it rolled out beautifully when the time came.

The quiche recipe I had calls for bacon (quiche lorraine) and onion.  It includes a variation to make seafood quiche; this suggests replacing the bacon with 1 C seafood of your choice, and substituting green onion for onion in an equal amount.  That’s a little weird, because the original recipe only calls for ½ C bacon.  Go figure.  I sliced up the mushrooms, threw two big Italian sausages in the skillet (expecting them to be far too much), hacked them into little pieces with the spatula as they cooked, and added the mushrooms as the sausage finished cooking.  They only need to be in there long enough to soak up some juices and cook until softened, which isn’t long for mushrooms.

As the crust was baking, I scooped all of the mushrooms and most of the sausage into a glass measuring cup.  When I hit 1 C, I threw in some onion (left from other recipes) to get 1 ⅓ C total.  This left a little sausage for me to snack upon, but not quite enough to bother setting aside for another recipe.

After the crust had started to brown, I shook in the sausage, onion, and Swiss cheese in alternating scoops to get a good mix inside the pie.  The first time I made a quiche I put all of the cheese in first, and thus learned that it does not float to the top while baking.  Not that you’d necessarily notice, but in my mind it makes more sense to do it this way.

The final tweak came in the egg mixture.  The recipe called for paprika.  I am certain we have paprika.  I have no idea where it went.  When I unpacked all the kitchen stuff in this apartment, I alphabetized the spice rack stuff.  There is one exception to this rule: rather than put Cinnamon three bottles back in its row, where it belongs, I keep it out front because I use it far more often than Chili Powder and Cilantro.  Paprika is one of those rare exceptions: because it’s in a tiny little jar, it lives on a smaller shelf above the rest.  But it’s still on the right-hand side, where it belongs alphabetically.  It wasn’t tonight.  Maybe I’m out and didn’t know; maybe it got mysteriously rearranged while the Chief Taster was pinch-hitting yesterday.  There’s really no telling.  Here’s how I get around a lack of paprika: use cayenne pepper, but not as much.  Since the rest of this dish is a lot of cheese and cream, their milder flavors can provide balance, and it will probably be ok.

I noticed something strange in the final product. Take a close look at where the crust is, compared to where the pie dish is. There's a considerable gap, and I don't know how it happened. It might have been the tweak in the pastry recipe; it might have been the cooling quiche contracting. I really don't know. I'm going to try the same crust recipe on a pie and see what happens.