Picnic Baskets!

Dance me to the end of love...one hopes there are many more nights of picnic-ing and music in between! Hubby and I are both big Leonard Cohen fans, and quickly bought tickets to Sandalford when the gig was announced.

I'm sure that Perth fans have already blogged about how wonderfully everyone played and how talented the musicians were...so I'm just going to extol the virtues of our picnic basket (7th Feb 2009)!
Yes, there was cheese!

Another night not long after, we organized a Girls' Night Out at work, and went to the Burswood Outdoor Cinema to see Slumdog Millionaire (ahahah yes cheese also made an appearance).
It was brilliant! And we're happy that we went early to picnic and weren't still eating during the "movie star autograph" scene.

A few recipes to share: quick, make 'em and 'nom nom nom' before the end of summer!


Abby’s Picnic Quiche
(Adapted from Linda McCartney's Quiche Linda from World of Vegetarian Cooking. The book was a present from Sarvelicious at least ten years ago now...it has the loveliest recipes, many of which have distracted fervent meat-eaters from noticing the lack of meat till after they'd asked for seconds and thirds! Hee hee)

Ingredients: (For a 20cm quiche tin)

1 ½ to 2 sheets pastry (I used the Pampas frozen, low fat, ready rolled variety that day)

1 1 ½ cups / 200 g smoked turkey sandwich meat*
Handful of sundried tomatoes
About 175g of grated cheese, approx 40% Tilba Gold / Applebox Smoked, 40% straight Cheddar and 10% Grana Padano / Parmesan / Pecorino **

4 eggs, whisked till super frothy
150ml milk (I used full cream, but will use 1/2 quantity of cream if it’s hanging around the fridge)

Method:
Pre-heat oven to 200°C (fan).

While your pastry is blind baking for 10 minutes, prepare your filling.

Roughly chop filling and mix in a medium bowl.

I think a quiche works best if you only mix in the eggs and add the milk just before you fill the case.

Bake for about 25 minutes till cooked. I turned the oven down to 180°C for the last 15 minutes because the browning pastry was making me nervous, but would you know it, everyone enjoyed the browned bits the best!

Notes:
*This was my ‘halal’ ingredient for a few girlfriends, in lieu of 6 rashers of bacon – if using bacon, fry up 1 small onion and diced bacon in the SDT oil, cool slightly before adding to quiche mix. Even when I was a veggie, soy bacon = eww!!

**Of course, as you can already guess, I think you can never have too much cheese in a quiche…if you pour the mix into your tin and the liquid still manages to form a little ‘moat’ around the edges, your quiche will work no matter how much cheese you use…trust me...

T = tablespoon, t = teaspoon


Bonus recipe time!

Mini eggplant and tomato boreks (What else will you do with the other sheets of pastry??)

Ingredients:
1 small onion, diced
1 medium eggplant, cut into ½ cm cubes
½ t cumin, ½ t turmeric, ½ t salt
Handful coriander leaves

2 tomatoes, diced (Cross bottoms and plunge into boiling water to remove skins)
2 T tomato paste or a big shake of sweet chilli sauce

Pastry (Again, I cheated and used frozen Pampas…)
1 small egg, beaten

Method:
Fry spices and onion till brown, add eggplant and fry for another 10 minutes till soft.
Add tomatoes and paste of choice, stir for 2 minutes and remove from heat.
Add coriander laves and allow mixture to cool.

Thaw pastry sheets, cut 11cm circles.
(If you’re using 8cm circles, pulse the filling in a food processor, otherwise the eggplant cubes won’t squish into the pastry)

Drop ~2t of mixture into the middle of each pastry, fold over in half and expel air to avoid baking explosions, crimp edges with a fork to seal, and brush with egg.

Cook in the upper part of the oven (about 180 to 200 ish) for 20 minutes or till golden.
The recipe allegedly freezes well prior to baking, but I think I've already mentioned the expressly limited contents of our freezer!
Oh alright, occasionally we allow a tin of yeast and frozen fruit in ;)

Notes:
The recipe makes 30 pastries using an 8cm cutter, but I ran out of pastry; so I warmed the rest over couscous for hubby's meal, topped with chopped tomatoes and more coriander.

Both recipes together took about 1 ½ hours prep and baking time. I think the quiche alone would’ve taken 25 minutes prep time (includes thawing time) plus 25 minutes cooking time.

The quiche went really well with a fellow Jameliche-ite's Persian watermelon and fetta salad, hommus, a King Island Roaring 40s blue, the Sandalford sparkly wine, and some Ogran crackers (gluten free and still yum).

And sometimes when the night is slow, the wretched and the meek; we gather up our hearts and go, a thousand kisses deep...