Asparagus Quiche

I made my first quiche the other night following Mom's verbal directions.  Quiche, it turns out (you all probably know this already) is incredibly easy to make and yields a first rate dish, definitely something you can feed to company.  My first try at it was really good.  Classic quiche is made in a pie crust but an alternative which I really like and which is ridiculously easy to make is a rice crust.  You press warm cooked rice to the inside of a glass pie plate to form the crust, spray with a small quantity of oil (Pam), and bake at ~350 F until it dries out and starts to brown slightly.  This is particularly easy if you happen to have some leftover rice to warm in the microwave; gets rid of leftovers, too.  Then you just add grated cheese, onions (sliced and separated into rings), and whatever else you are including - we had fresh asparagus from the garden chopped into 1/2 pieces - cover with beaten egg and milk mixture, and bake at 350 until done, about 45-50 minutes.  I used a mixture of cheddar and Swiss cheeses, mostly because we have some not-very-good Swiss cheese that I have been trying to use up.  Here are the quantities (in grams; aren't kitchen scales great?) I used, in detail:

Rice, white, cooked                                       205

Onion                                                           41

Garlic                                                           9

Eggs   (6 large)                                            358

Olive oil                                                        1

Milk, nonfat  (1 cup)                                      245

Cheese                                                        142

Asparagus, raw                                             83

 I seasoned the beaten egg and milk mixture with salt, pepper and chopped savory from the herb garden.

Obvious flavor options are what vegetable you use, what cheeses you use, what herbs you use, what crust, etc.

NUTRITION:
Add it all up and here is what you get:

The recipe comprises 1084 grams containing 1474 calories.  Cut it into 6 servings and each is 181 g with 246 cal.  Big boys are likely to eat two pieces, so double that for them.  The breakdown is:

                        246 cal                57 carbs         123 fat          65 protein
                         100%                  23%                 50%            27%

Whoada thought this classic "health food"  would be 50% fat calories?   Well, that's what you get from eggs and cheese.  Our local has recently started stocking reduced fat cheddar cheeses from Cabot Creamery, 50% less and 75% less (made from 1% milk).  I plugged these into the calculator to see what effect using them would have on the quiche nutritional composition:

                          212 cal                   57 carb            90 fat             65 protein
                           100%                     27%                 42%               31%

                           197 cal                   57 carb            75 fat             65 protein
                           100%                     29%                 38%               33%

So you could skinny this up by using the low fat cheese.   I bought some of each to try:  not bad but noticeably not as good as the full fat cheddar when just eating it.  They would probably be OK in cooking.  On the other hand, growing kids need fat to make lipid membranes and nerve sheaths, etc. so you do not want to take too much fat out of the diet.  Couple a piece of quiche with a veg (we had broccoli) and a piece of fruit and your total for the meal is 466 calories in a 48/32/20 ratio.  That's pretty healthy eating and you can always control total calories by adjusting portion size.

By the way, if you use whole milk instead of nonfat, it adds another 12 fat calories per serving.

So, adjust the fat as appropriate to the crew you are feeding by selecting the milk and cheese you use, eat with some fruits and vegetables to add carbs, and adjust total calories through portion control.

Delicious, nutritious, and versatile.  Oh, and easy.  Oh, and people think it is gourmet so you can serve it to company.  And, there's a gazillion ways to play with the flavor combinations.

 

May 31, 2012

With the heat, the spinach is reaching end-of-season in the garden, and the chickens have been getting ahead of us on eggs, so I pulled a bunch and made fresh spinach quiche for dinner. 
We had just enough asparagus for two and Zoe picked the first baby beets of the season.  Great dinner from the garden (and hen house).
L