Sunday, February 28, 2010

Vegetable Quiche

Actually, this is not a quiche at all in the true sense. It's a casserole with quiche like ingredients and no crust. This is one of the many dishes containing the Big E, evil eggplant. I personally like eggplant, and many times when the BF's husband goes to California, I whip up ratatouille for dinner. However, my husband emphatically does not like it, so I have to wait for events like potluck dinners to cook all these eggplant recipes.
Anyway, last night, his church group was having a potluck dinner, and I made vegetable quiche. I planned to make another side dish too, just so he could eat it, but I had a cold, so I stuck with one.
To prepare this dish, you start out by slicing and salting one eggplant. This is supposed to draw the moisture out. Since I had plenty of time, I did so. Then, you lightly fry the eggplant, and put it in a baking dish, and sprinkle it with chopped onion, parsley, thyme, and salt and pepper. Then, you top the eggplant with thick slices of what are supposed to be beefsteak tomatoes, but I went with generic supermarket, since beefsteak tomatoes are only available in the late summer at farmers markets.
Then, you top each slice of tomato with a slice of mozzarella, and pour the quichey eggs and cream mixture overall. Then, you bake it for 40 minutes.
It's perfectly good. It has a rather mild flavor. The potluck people seemed to like it. Let's hope they don't get sick of eggplant, because they'll be eating a lot of it.
Some of these dishes, I have no idea who I will get to eat them. Probably no one, if I tell them what it is. For example, this book contains no less than two recipes for head cheese. For those of you not raised in Pennsylvania, or not familiar with the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who describes in detail how to make head cheese in one of her books, head cheese is made from a pig's head. Cheese is a misnomer. There's nothing cheesy about it.
You remove this and that, boil the rest, reserve the ears(?) and then chop it all up and chill it, and it becomes a meat in aspic kind of thing.
The BF's daughter now takes great pleasure in rooting through the cookbook in order to find particularly, shall we say unusual, recipes, to announce to the general public. When she proclaimed that I would have to make head cheese, the BF's husband gave me a look that suggested equal parts anguish and a sort of if-you-make-me-eat-this-it's-the-divorce-court-for-you type of thing. Fun.

1 comment:

  1. I bet he never had the evil "E" vegetable fried the way we had it in the summers in the Big House. It was years before I knew there was any other way to cook it, then it took a while to become converted!

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