Online Cooking Group Week Two -- The Magic Quiche

We had some of our dearest friends and their kiddos over for dinner Friday, and I wanted to do something totally casual, quick and easy, so I settled on breakfast for dinner. I have a couple of Vosges milk chocolate and bacon bars that I’ve been dying to use in pancakes, so I figured this was the perfect excuse.

I also wanted to try my hand at making a quiche for this week’s cooking group… I know, I know, I’ve never made a quiche -- crazy, no?? On a different occasion, I would have gone with Rachel’s grown-up recipe and thrown in asparagus and goat cheese and all sorts of yummy goodies, but half our dinner party consisted of four mildly picky kiddos (+ my girlies have never had quiche) So I thought it would be best if I eased into things and went with a classic bacon and cheese quiche, with heavy cream.

Seriously I was making a heart attack in a pie dish.


The actual assembly was easy, things went smoothly, and Audrey even got into the action. So far, so good. But then I cooked it for the prescribed 45 minutes, let it cool, and it was completely raw in the middle – pure liquid. So another mimosa, a little swearing and back it went into the over for another 15 minutes. Yep, you guessed it, still raw. I was perplexed, frustrated and swearing profusely (don’t worry the girlies were all in the other room, well out of earshot, playing dress up.) Back in the oven for another 20 minutes, and it was finally done, but I was feeling like a massive failure – I mean seriously how hard is it to make a quiche??

I’m still not quite sure what went wrong, but I wouldn’t recommend the recipe I used, as I think there must’ve been something wrong with the ratios (or at least I’m telling myself that so I’ll feel better about the whole enterprise.) So I’m not even going to include it and instead suggest that you go with Rachel’s, as she’s an aficionado of the quiche.

The good news is that despite all the cooking challenges, the quiche was rockin (thus the "magic" in the title, but really how can you go wrong with eggs, heavy cream, loads of cheese and bacon in a pie crust…) The girls loved it, and Millie spent the rest of the weekend requesting leftover quiche for every meal, which was pretty freakin cute if I do say so myself.

Can’t wait to check out all the things you guys whipped up this week!

What You're Cooking

This pretty much represents the gist of our weekend meals after a rather unfortunate incident with a quiche on Friday night... More on that tomorrow.

Let me just say, you guys have been busy whipping up pretty awesome new meals for the online cooking group...I know I promised to post some of my faves on Thursdays, but last week kicked my butt a bit, so I'm a bit behind.

So without further ado, a few of your meals that I'm dying to try.

Ann's corn chowder


Melissa’s Goat Cheese & Basil Soufflé

Jill’s Won Ton Raviolis

The Online Cooking Group -- Week One Crispy Chicken

image via Cookie... while I managed to cook something new this week, clearly I didn't have it together enough to actually photograph it too.

So here we are cooking "together"... fun, no?

One of our weekly staples is Bryan's crispy chicken. It's easy (he just dredges skinless chicken breast in egg and breadcrumbs and then fries it outside in our little fryer), and the girlies love it...but it's not exactly the healthiest thing on the block. Did I mention it was fried??

I wanted to try and recreate something similar but baked to eliminate all that fried food guilt, so I scoured my big recipe binder and found this recipe I'd saved from an old issue of Cookie (summer of 2007 I think...) I just made the chicken (no oven roasted tomatoes on a baguette, just chicken) and served it with oven roasted rosemary potatoes and steamed broccoli.


The girlies dug it, Bryan liked it, but he prefers the fried, as he says the chicken is juicier. Overall it was a success. I'll definitely make it again!

So I can't wait to poke around and see what you all cooked. I'll post a couple of my favorites from your blogs over here on Thursday!

Happy cooking.


Oven Baked Crispy Chicken -- Adapted from Cookie

• 4 four-ounce chicken cutlets, pounded thin
• 2 cups plain low-fat yogurt
• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 cups unseasoned bread crumbs
• Zest of 2 lemons, grated
• 2 tablespoons fresh rosemary, finely chopped
• 8 tablespoons grated Parmesan

Place the chicken and yogurt in a resealable plastic bag and refrigerate for at least 3 hours.

Preheat oven to 425° F. In a shallow pan, combine the bread crumbs, zest, rosemary, Parmesan, olive oil, and more salt and pepper.

Remove the cutlets, shaking off any excess yogurt, and press them firmly into the bread-crumb mixture.

Transfer to a pan lined with nonstick foil and bake until browned and firm, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove and let cool.

Making Lunch...

I loved watching Beastie Boy, Mike D busting out his sons' school lunches on his wife's online cooking show... He's so incredibly famous and cool, and yet his morning routine is strikingly similar to mine. Nice.

I mentioned a while back that I'd abandoned the plan to let Audrey buy lunch at school after volunteering in the cafeteria. (Basically, I was completely freaked out when my otherwise fruit loving daughter passed-up both orange wedges and a bananna and selected a hamburger, french fries and chocolate pudding for lunch.)

The situation at her school is decent in that the kids have healthy items to choose from like the aforementioned fresh fruit + little cups of broccoli and baby carrots with ranch, etc...but the main dishes are pretty crummy -- lots of fried foods, lots of processed foods, and they consider things like apple juice and pudding a side dish, which to me is completely unacceptable.

What left me so bummed out and demoralized though was this notion that no matter how much you reinforce with your kids the importance of making healthy food choices, (and I truly believe many parents do just that) they will still pick pudding over baby carrots 9 out of 10 times if given the choice. This was exactly the case that day I volunteered in the cafeteria -- every. single. kid. picked the pudding. And most kids LOVE oranges... I'm just saying.

The easy solution would be for the school NOT to offer pudding as a side dish, no? Seems so very obvious, but in the meantime, the plan is to pack Audrey's lunch four days a week and let her buy once a week. We look at the menu together on Sunday evening and decide which day looks best. She usually goes for pizza day, but enchiladas are a close second.

Now my daughter is a major creature of habit. I went into the packing lunch exercise with the goal of mixing things up each day to keep lunch exciting, but she's happiest with a core lunch of peanut butter (I buy organic) on wheat bread (she loves really dense wheat bread, which is great!) with no crusts. I do try to change up the sides a little bit. She gets fruit or some organic apple sauce, a little yogurt or a cheese stick and some pirate's booty or a few organic pretzels. + she has a little Sigg bottle for water. I also throw in a Newman's Own cookie, so she doesn't feel totally deprived of anything fun.

We pack it all in little reusable containers in an insulated lunch box with a sweet note and a fun napkin. My little budding environmentalist puts the napkin back in her lunch box if it's not too dirty. I of course promptly threw it away every night until she informed me Friday afternoon that she's trying to save the earth here (her words) and that she's been trying to give me clues, but I'm just not getting it.

Clearly I'm not hip to the ways of my six-year old über tree hugger... My bad.

What's Your Favorite Cookbook?

Big Sur Bakery Cookbook -- Currently at the top of my list...

Now that we're gearing up for the Online Cooking Club, I've been poking through all my cookbooks for new recipes to try. My current go-to is Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food + The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook -- an über practical book given to me by my friends Julie and Tim, both excellent cooks.

But I'm hankering for a couple of new cookbooks, less practical and more inspiring... killer photos, great text... the whole deal.

Here are a few more on my wish list.

Falling Cloudberries

Baked: New Frontiers in Baking

River Cottage Family Cookbook

Miss Dahl's Voluptuous Delights

So, what are your cookbook faves?

It's Time... The Cooking Group

image by roland bello via gourmet

Just as I was thinking that it's time to officially kick-off our little online cooking group, my friend Tiffany sends me this great article. The gist is that kids love repetition, and if you have 5-10 foolproof, kid-approved recipes in your arsenal , dinnertime is pretty much done and done.

So with that as our guiding principal, I've rejiggered the guidelines for the cooking club a bit. Rather than dictating an ingredient to cook around each week, I'm proposing that we just try something new, perhaps slightly out of our comfort zone, but with kids in mind. (This also helps those of you participating that are vegetarians.)

That doesn't mean we have to dumb things down, but this isn't an exercise in extravagance either. The goal is to impress our kids not each other -- although impressing your kids with good food is awfully impressive...

I think I have a good record of everyone that "signed up" from the original post. I've created a side bar on the right with all the participants. Let me know if you're listed and don't want to do it so I can remove you, OR if you want to be added.

I'll add participants through the end of the week and close it on Friday.

So, here's the deal... For the next 8 weeks (schedule below) we'll all create one "new" dinner per week and post the recipe and results on Tuesdays on our own blogs. In addition to posting my recipe here on Tuesdays, I'll also post three of my favorites from the rest of the group on Thursdays.

Once we're done, hopefully we'll all have 5-10 new rockin new recipes ,and all our dinnertime woes will be solved.

Happy Cooking!

ONLINE COOKING CLUB SCHEDULE

• Week One -- Tuesday, Sept 22nd
• Week Two -- Tuesday, Sept 29th
• Week Three -- Tuesday, Oct. 6th
• Week Four -- Tuesday, Oct 13th
• Week Five -- Tuesday, Oct 20th
• Week Six -- Tuesday, Oct 27th
• Week Seven -- Tuesday, Nov 3rd
• Week Eight -- Tuesday, Nov 10th

An Exceptional Dip + Some Pesto

image via martha stewart.com

(Tiff this is for you ;-)

My friend Sharon came to dinner a couple of weeks ago toting along this insanely yummy dip, and now I'm obsessed with it. I like it best with pita chips, but it's also good with veggies... Heck, I'd even put it on a baked potato.

We've got a bunch of basil in the backyard that has to be cut back tomorrow, so I'm planning on making some of the dip, plus a big batch of pesto. The girls have yet to try pesto, so my plan is mix a couple of spoonfuls into some angel hair pasta, give it a groovy name and serve it up this weekend. We'll see how it goes...

I like this simple, straightforward pesto recipe from Martha, as it calls for only one clove of garlic, and I tend to prefer things that are light on the stinkin rose.

Basil Parmesan Dip

• 1 pint organic sour cream
• 1 clove of garlic
• juice from 1 organic lemon
• 4 cups loosely packed fresh basil leaves
• 1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
• kosher salt + fresh ground pepper to taste

Put garlic and basil in food processor and pulse until chopped.

Add sour cream, lemon juice, and parmesan cheese. Blend until smooth and bright green, salt and pepper to taste.

Classic Basil Pesto -- adapted via Martha Stewart

Makes 1 1/4 cups

• 1/2 cup pine nuts, or walnuts
• 4 cups loosely packed fresh basil leaves
• 1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
• 1 clove garlic
• Salt and pepper
• 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spread nuts on a rimmed baking sheet; toast in oven until golden and fragrant, tossing occasionally, 5 to 8 minutes. Let cool completely.

In a food processor, combine toasted nuts, basil, Parmesan, and garlic; season with salt and pepper. Process until finely chopped.

With machine running, pour olive oil in a steady stream through the feed tube; process until smooth.

The Birthday Dinner

Growing up, part of our birthday celebrations always included dinner of our choice cooked by my mother. My hubby's family had the same tradition -- he always picked crab cakes and I requested beef stroganoff, which is funny as neither of us ever eat those meals anymore, but I digress...

Today is our oldest daughter's 6th birthday, so in carrying on the tradition, I asked her earlier this week what she wanted for dinner tonight at our family party. She requested white beans and sausage pasta, which is technically two meals, but it's her day, so she can go wild.


Let me pause here to say how proud I am of her choices. Despite some evidence to the contrary on this blog, we've made progress friends, as I'm certain her request last year would have been pizza or nuggets and Annie's mac and cheese.

The white beans are just a simple pot of navy or great northern beans that we cook all day -- we just sauté some celery and onion, add pre-soaked beans, chicken broth + spices (usually some Tony Chachere's , kosher salt, some fresh ground pepper, a bit of sage...), bring to a boil and then simmer for the rest of the day. Served over brown rice, this is one of our all-time favorite meals... We love it, the girls love it, it's easy, healthy and cheap. A major win!

The sausage pasta is a new favorite we make about once a week and is pretty much a simple combo of orecchiette, turkey sausage and loads of Parmesan. I serve it with just the meat and pasta for the girlies + a side of steamed green beans, and after I remove their portion from the pot, I add sautéed spinach and asparagus for Bryan and me. Maybe by next year she'll be eating that too...

I can dream ;-)

Orecchiette with Sausage, Asparagus and Spinach

• 1 pound orecchiette
• 4 sweet Italian sausages (about 1 pound), casing removed and crumbled
• Small bunch of asparagus, trimmed into 1 inch pieces
• 1 pound spinach, washed, trimmed, and cut into pieces
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• ¼ cup organic chicken broth
• 1 teaspoon organic butter
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
• Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Place sausage in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Brown for about 8-10 minutes, transfer to a bowl.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add pasta and cook until al dente, 8-10 minutes; drain, reserving about ½ cup of the cooking water.

In the same skillet that you cooked the sausage in (don’t wash it out) add the olive oil and once hot, sauté the asparagus until almost tender, then add the spinach and continue sautéing until wilted.

Add sausage mixture to sautéed spinach and asparagus and mix together.

Add the orecchiette to the mixture. Stir to combine, adding chicken broth plus the cooking liquid if pasta seems too dry; add the teaspoon of butter, sprinkle with cheese, salt and freshly ground black pepper and serve immediately.