Quiche and Roasted Carrots

Meal: Quiche, roasted carrots, and biscuits
Cooking time: about 50 minutes in the oven, betweeen everything, and about 30 minutes prep
Total cost (fed 4 people dinner and Jeff and I quiche for breakfast today): about $8.50
Local ingredients: eggs, cheese, potatoes, butter and buttermilk (homemade from local cream)
Organic ingredients: flour, carrots, sugar

I had my cousin make the carrots last night. He’s a self-professed non-cook, but he’s more than willing to help out, so I directed him while I was dealing with the quiche. They were the same roasted carrots as last week, and they proved themselves amazingly flexible, going in at 425 when the quiche was started, then down to 325 for awhile longer, then back up to 450 when the biscuits went in. The baking dish full vanished, so he must have done something right. :)

I found myself having oven issues last night. The carrots needed 30 to 40 minutes at 350. The quiche needed 15 minutes at 425 and 20 minutes or so at 325. The biscuits needed 10 to 12 minutes at 450. This was a bit of a quandary. I solved the problem by putting in the carrots with the quiche, and as I said, just cooking them at whatever temperature everything else needed to be cooked at. When the quiche was done, I pulled it out (it was in the big 8×12 Pyrex) and set it on top of the stove with a cookie sheet over it while the biscuits went in. It was still perfectly warm when we cut into it 15 minutes later.

Into the quiche last night went 4 large potatoes, 1 cup of cheese, 2 cups of fat free milk, and 8 eggs. The eggs were a surprise - 3 of them were double-yolked! I’d never seen a double-yolked egg before, so that was a bit of a delight. I ended up using the 8 planned eggs, anyhow, because the double-yolks were about half the size of what we normally get. I microwaved the potatoes until they were soft, and then chopped them up and distributed them into the bottom of the 8×12 Pyrex. The eggs, cheese, and milk were beaten together and poured over the potatoes, and the whole thing was salted and peppered. (Side note: one of my birthday presents was a pepper grinder. Freshly ground pepper is heavenly; now I’m annoyed we waited this long to get a grinder.) It went into the oven at 425 for 15 minutes, and then the heat was reduced to 325 for 20 minutes. The result was poofy, starting to brown just a touch around the edges, and just set and creamy in the middle - in other words, perfect.

Lastly, we had biscuits. I used butter I’d made that morning, and the buttermilk from it, and it doesn’t get much better than that.