As you can probably tell from the photo, I have always had a love-hate relationship with pastry. Occasionally, I have somehow managed to nail it, such as using store-bought puff pastry to great effect in my umm ali dessert or making it from scratch with mince pies. And I am sure Sam will agree with me when I say that more often than not, store-bought pastry saves a lot of mess and heartache in the kitchen. To see what I mean, check out her fabulous party pies recipe, an Aussie classic.
But I digress. Last week, I decided to draw down on my ridiculous oversupply of eggs by making a quiche. I sort-of used Mary Berry’s quiche Lorraine recipe for guidance but deviated from her wisdom pretty darn quickly. For example, her quiche recipe suggested cream but as well as having enough eggs to feed an army, I also needed to get rid of some half-fat creme fraiche, so I compensated for the lack of fatty richness by creating a quiche mixture that included four – FOUR! – eggs.
And while Mary makes pastry look easy, I really couldn’t be bothered to make it from scratch on a lazy Sunday night so I bought a roll from Asda, cranked up Absolute Radio 90s and set about making a quiche laden with all manner of goodies, including a topping of chorizo slices.
Before you start cooking, a cautionary tale – if you eat this bad boy straight out of the oven, the eggy filling is highly likely to collapse and suddenly resemble that rather jelly-like scrambled egg you often see in hotel breakfast buffets. Like revenge, this quiche is definitely a dish best served at the very least cooled down and ideally chilled.
Excuse-the-presentation quiche
Ingredients
One roll of store-bought shortcrust pastry
25g salted butter
1 red onion, diced
150g diced bacon
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 red pepper
200g grated cheese – any cheese that melts well will do
100g cherry tomatoes
250ml (1 cup) creme fraiche
4 eggs
Salt, pepper, basil and oregano to taste
Slices of chorizo to decorate
Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 200C.
- Roll out the pastry and line a pie dish or round cake tin with it. Line the pastry with baking paper and baking beads and blind-bake for 10 minutes.
- While the pastry is blind-baking, fry the bacon, onion and garlic in the butter until the onion is soft. Leave aside to cool.
- While waiting for the bacon, onion and garlic to cool, dice the red pepper and cut the cherry tomatoes into quarters. Add the red pepper to the bacon mix.
- Grate the cheese.
- Mix the creme fraiche, eggs and seasonings.
- Stir the bacon mix into the egg mix and pour into the pastry case.
- Arrange the slices of chorizo on top of the quiche.
- Bake for 15-20 minutes. Check every five minutes or so.
- Serve when cooled or after it has been chilled.