Crustless Broccoli Jalapeno Pepperjack Cheese Quiche

Quiches are one of those dishes which sound fancy but are delicious, super easy to make and quite difficult to mess up. Because, eggs, cheese and veggies - how bad can they taste together?

We had bought a big bag of broccoli and I was thinking of ways to finish it up. Steamed broccoli tempered with some garlic sauteed in olive oil tastes delicious - but how much broccoli can you eat that way?

So onto quiches it was. The recipe below is an amalgam of my own addition to recipes from several sources on the web. What all that browsing taught me was, quiche recipes follow a same basic template - you just add on to that.

Crustless Broccoli Jalapeno Pepperjack Cheese Quiche

Ingredients
Broccoli - 2 cups, chopped into small bit sized pieces
Onion - 1 large, sliced fairly thinly lengthwise
Jalapenos - 3, 2 chopped into pieces (divide into two portions), 1 sliced into rings
Garlic - 6 cloves, sliced thinly breadth-wise
Pepperjack cheese - 1.5 cups, grated (divide into two portions)
Eggs - 4
Milk - 1.5 cups
1 tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (red chili powder), optional
Butter 1tbsp, melted + some more to cook veggies
Olive oil - for cooking
Salt and pepper to taste

Method
1. Preheat oven to 350F. Spray cooking-oil spray onto a 9" square pie dish..
2. In a pan, heat olive oil and butter. Toss in the onions, add a little bit of salt and cook, stirring frequently till onions begin to turn brown.
3. Toss in the garlic and give a couple of turns. Then toss in the broccoli and cook uncovered till broccoli is crisp tender. Season with pepper and salt. Divide the mixture into two portions. Start the next step while the broccoli mixture is still warm.
4. Spread one portion of the jalapenos on the base of the pie-dish. Then spread one portion of the broccoli mixture on top of it. Finally spread one portion of the grated cheese.
5. Repeat step 4.
6. In a bowl, whisk the eggs till frothy. Then mix in the milk, flour, melted butter, chili powder, salt and pepper till combined.
7. Pour the egg mixture on top of the ingredients in the pie dish. Arrange jalapeno rings on the top.
8. Place pie dish into the oven. Bake for 45 minutes or until the eggs are no longer runny in the center and are more or less firm (start checking on the dish from the 35 minute mark).
9. Put the oven on broil and transfer pie dish to the topmost rack. Take quiche out of the oven as soon as brown spots start appearing on the (usually 2-3 minutes, watch like a hawk else you might be looking at a burnt quiche - I caught mine just on the nick of time).
10. Let quiche rest for at least 10 minutes before serving warm.

Quiche refrigerates well and tastes quite nice even when cold.

Note
1. You can substitute pepperjack cheese with any kind you like. I thought pepperjack gave a nice spicy kick to the quiche.
2. The jalapenos are optional. Again, I thought they enhanced the flavor of the quiche.

Green bean potato bake

I did not use to like green beans at all. With age comes wisdom and a wider taste palette. Thus I can stand and even some times enjoy eating green beans now. This bake is one of those instances when I thoroughly savored the green beans (most probably because its distinct taste was tempered by the yumminess of the potatoes, egg and bread crumbs!).

The recipe is heavily adapted from here.

Green bean potato bake

Ingredients (makes 4 portions for breakfast or 2 for lunch):
For the potato layer:
3 medium potatoes
1 tbsp all purpose flour
salt and pepper to taste

For the green bean layer:
1/4 kg green beans
2 tsp ginger-garlic paste
1 medium onion
1.5 tsp chili powder
1 tsp dhania powder
1/2 tsp jeera powder
1/4 tsp turmeric powder
Oil
Salt to taste
Water to cook the beans


For the egg layer
1 egg
1 tbsp milk
Salt and pepper to taste


For the bread crumb layer
2 slices bread (preferably end bread for extra crunchiness)
1.5 tsp garlic powder (optional)
1.5 tsp onion powder (optional)
1 tbsp butter

Method:
1. Boil the potatoes and peel them. Add the flour, salt and pepper and mash with a light hand till the ingredients are just combined. Keep aside.
2. Destring and chop the beans into 1/4" pieces. Pour enough water to cover, add the turmeric and a little salt and cook till almost done.
3. In a frying pan, add a little oil and toss in the ginger-garlic paste when hot. Stir fry for a few seconds and add in the onions.
4. When onions change color, add all the masala powders and salt. Stir fry for a few seconds and toss in the beans. Cook till the beans are done and the raw taste of the masala powders is gone. Keep aside.
5. Beat the eggs with the milk, salt and pepper.
6. Grease a microwave safe baking dish (mine is a round dish about 7") with a little butter or olive oil. Take half of the potato mixture and pat down on the floor of the dish to form an even layer.
7. Spoon the beans mixture evenly on top of the potato layer. Now spread the remaining potato on top of the beans.
8. Pop the dish into your microwave and cook on high for 8  minutes (timing may vary depending on the microwave).
9. While it is cooking, process the bread in a food processor into crumbs. Mix in the onion and garlic powders if using.
10. Heat the butter in a pan and when it has just melted, add in the bread crumbs. Fry on medium-low heat till the crumbs are crunchy. Keep aside.
11. After 8 minutes are up, take out the baking dish and pour the egg mixture on top spreading it as much as you can. Put dish back into the microwave and cook for 1 minute on high.
12. Take the dish out again and top evenly with the bread crumbs. Pop the dish back into the microwave and cook for 2 minutes on high.

Serve hot! It reheats very well, so feel free to pop any leftovers (or even the just-made dish) into the fridge after it has cooled down.Reheat just before serving.

Oat muffin

This is an easy-to-make mildly sweet, tasty and healthy breakfast muffin. The oats make it very filling. I eat it as a quick energy booster before heading out for my morning walk.

Recipe adapted from here.

Oatmeal Muffins

Ingredients:
1 cup quick-cooking oats
1 cup milk (fat free is ok)
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 egg
1/4 cup white sugar (can substitute with brown sugar or honey)
1/2 cup apple sauce
2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon powder (can substitute with 1 tsp pure vanilla essence)
1/2 tsp salt
Handful of chopped walnuts (or any other nut you fancy, optional)

Method (makes about 8 medium-sized muffins):
1.Start on the apple sauce if you are making it from scratch (recipe below). Make sure it cools completely before using it in the recipe.
2. Soak the oats in the milk for 15 minutes.
3. Pre-heat oven to 220C. Grease a muffin tray with cooking oil.
4. Sift together the flours, baking powder, salt and cinnamon powder. Mix in the sugar (if using) and set aside.
5. In a separate bowl, mix the eggs and apple sauce together. If using honey instead of sugar, mix it in.
6. Add in the oats-milk mixture to the eggs/apple-sauce mixture.
7. Add in the flour mix and chopped walnuts to the above mix till just combined.
8. Fill in the muffin cups till 2/3 of the way through with the above mixture.
9. Bake in the pre-heated oven for about 25 minutes or till a toothpick inserted into the middle of the muffin comes out clean.

I personally prefer the taste of the muffin after it has cooled down a bit rather than straight from the oven. Serve as is or with a light dab of jam in the middle of a muffin cut in half if you prefer a sweeter taste.

Applesauce recipe (makes about 1/2 cup of sauce):
Ingredients:
1 apple
1 tsp lemon juice
Enough water to cover the apple pieces

Method:
1. Peel and core the apple. Chop it into small pieces.
2. Add it to a narrow pan and add enough water to just completely cover the apple pieces.
3. Add in the the lemon juice.
4. Bring mixture to a boil. Then, cover and simmer for about 20-25 minutes.
5. Turn off heat when the apple pieces are easily mashable with the back of a spoon. Mash the pieces so that you have a chunky-smooth apple sauce mixture.

Egg roll

For me, egg rolls are the stars of Calcutta street food. When we lived in Calcutta, we used to buy egg rolls on Saturday nights as a weekend as a treat. I have never managed to get quite the same taste at home (obviously). Still, the egg roll recipe below makes a very satisfying and tasty dish with very little effort.

Using maida malabar parottas will take the taste of this dish to an entire new level. However, using wheat rotis is a not-too-bad healthy compromise.

Egg roll

Egg Roll

Ingredients (for one roll):
1 cooked wheat chapathi
1 egg
1/2 small onion, chopped
Lime juice, about 1 tsp
Tomato sauce
Green chilli sauce
Soy sauce
Pepper
Salt

All the ingredients

Method
1. Add the lime juice to the chopped onions and set aside.
2. Spray cooking oil on a tawa and place on medium heat.
3. Place chapathi on heated tawa. Break egg over the chapathi. Spread egg as much as you can over the surface of the chapathi.
4. Sprinkle pepper and salt on the egg (remember soy sauce is salty, so do not go over board with the salt).
5. Carefully flip the chapathi so that the egg side is facing down.
6. Continue cooking on medium heat. When the chapathi rises a bit, it means the eggs are cooked and are fluffing up.
7. Remove the egg coated chapathi from the tawa and place non-egg side down on a plate.
8. Sprinkle the onions in a vertical line across a diameter line of the chapathi.
9. Sprinkle all three sauces over the onions. The quantities of the sauces you use depends on your taste but in general, adding equal amounts of each (around 1-2 tsp each) tastes best.
10. Roll up the chapathi carefully so that the filling does not spill out.
11. If you want the roll to look professional, you can wrap a piece of wax paper or napkin paper around the lower half of the roll so that the filling does not fall out.

Serve hot!

Notes:
1. You can mince about 1/4-1/2 a green chilli and add it to the chopped onion/lime juice mixture. It enhances taste but could turn out to be very spicy if the chillis are fiery!

Applesauce cake

I used to like apples once upon a time. Then, I went to grad school. Apple was the cheapest fruit and as a poor Indian grad student, I ate one as my daily fruit quota religiously for close to 3 years. Then, not surprisingly, I got sick of it. Now, while I can tolerate fresh apples occasionally (read, once in 6 months or so), I cannot eat it on a regular basis. Thus, all apples lovingly brought by visitors took up more and more space on the refrigerator shelf.

So, when sis asked me to bake a cake, I immediately decided that apples would be the base. I first picked a recipe from Good Housekeeping magazine but was unsure of some of the ingredients. Besides, nowadays, unless a recipe has good reviews, I do not try it out (unless, of course, it looks too good even on paper).

Then, I luckily stumbled upon this recipe for applesauce cake. This blog usually features great recipes and this cake did not disappoint either. It was easy to make and the end result was moist, fluffy and delicious.

I adapted the recipe a little. Here it is:

Applesauce Cake

Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 tsp cinnamon powder
1/4 tsp nutmeg powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
3 eggs
1/2 cup butter (I used 1/4 cup butter and a little less than 1/4 cup oil - use non-flavorful oils like vegetable, canola or sunflower oil)
3/4 cup sugar
1 cup applesauce (recipe below)
1/4 cup yogurt (diluted with a little water and mixed well)
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 tbsp slivered almonds


Method
1. Pre-heat oven to 180C. Grease a baking pan and lightly flour it
2. Sift the flour, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg and baking soda together a couple of times. Keep aside.
3. Beat the sugar with butter/oil till light and fluffy.
4. Add the eggs one by one, mixing well after adding each egg.
5. Add in the applesauce and the vanilla essence and mix well.
6. Add in half of the dry mixture from step 1 and mix till almost blended.
7. Now add in the yogurt and the rest of the dry mix and stir till just mixed.
8. Pour in the mixture into the prepared pan.
9. Sprinkle the slivered almonds over the top of the cake.
10. Bake immediately for 30 minutes or till a toothpick inserted in various parts of the cake comes out clean.
11. Cool completely on a wire-rack.

Recipe for apple sauce:
Ingredients (makes about a cup)
2 apples, peeled, cored and chopped into medium pieces
1 tsp lemon juice
Water

Method
1. Place apple pieces in a pan and pour enough water to cover.
2. Bring the mixture to a boil and add lemon juice.
3. Cover pan and cook on medium-low heat for about 25-30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
4. Applesauce is done when apples can be easily mashed with the back of a spoon. Water remaining in the pan is okay.
5. Mash the apples with a big spoon or masher till it forms a mixture with little lumps.
6. Applesauce is ready. Cool before using in the above recipe.

Notes
1. You can add sugar/cinnamon powder to the apple-sauce as per your taste. I did not add any for the applesauce I used for the cake.

Quick masala egg scramble

When you don't have the time or the patience to cook, here is a simple recipe for a side-dish which goes well with rotis.

Ingredients (enough for a generous portion for 1):
1 egg
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium tomato, chopped
1 green chilli, slit vertically and then chopped into 2
1/2 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp cumin powder
1/2 tsp aamchur (or chat masala)
1 tbsp chopped coriander leaves
Salt to taste
Oil

Method:
1. Heat oil in a frying pan on medium heat
2. Drop in the green chilli and toast till white spots appear on it.
3. Add in the onions and salt and fry till golden brown.
4. Toss in the tomatoes and cook till mostly mushy.
5. Add all the masala powders and stir for a minute.
6. Break in the egg and mix till egg is scrambled and mixed with the rest of the ingredients.
7. Cook till eggs are done (about 1-2 minutes).
8. Adjust for salt, garnish with coriander leaves and serve hot.

Surprisingly delicious!

Moroccan orange cake

I think I have been blowing my own trumpet too much about my baking abilities. Sis (who is not in my city and hence not one of the frequent recipients of my culinary output) is so impressed that she asked me to bake a cake and send it to her. So this cake is traveling all the way to Hong Kong now!

Sis picked orange cake and I Googled and got this recipe:

http://moroccanfood.about.com/od/dessertsandcookies/r/orange_cake.htm

The cake has simple ingredients and is easy to put together. However, contrary to what the comments in the link say, I could not detect any orangey flavor while baking. The cake did came out looking spongy.

I followed the recipe as is with the following modifications:

1. Halved the recipe - correspondingly the baking time was about 25 minutes.
2. I do not own a bundt pan, so used a regular round cake tin.
3. Sprinkled sliced almonds (or whatever version of sliced I could get using a knife, a chopping board and almonds) on top of the cake before baking.
4 . After cooling the cake for about 10 minutes, I dusted powdered sugar on top. You can skip this if you prefer milder sweetness.

Orange cake cooling on an improvised rack.

I have not tasted the cake. Will update the result of the taste test once I hear back from sis!

Update:
Verdict from sis: The cake is totally yummy. It is so spongy and soft.

Yeah, this recipe is a keeper!

Fruit cake

http://deepann.wordpress.com/2006/03/30/rich-fruit-plum-cake/

For some reason, this recipe had been calling out to me ever since I first laid eyes upon it. I love "plum cake" loaded with fruits and nuts that we get in bakeries in India and this recipe sounded like a great one for baking my own.

Making this cake to ring in the New Year seemed like a perfect occasion marker. I set out soaking the fruits a week before baking day - it should have been earlier but we did not get the brandy till that day. Though I had mostly bought broken nuts, chopping the cherries, almonds and dates still took quite a while. Seriously, prep work is the most laborious step of most recipes. I soaked the dried fruits and nuts in brandy and put in in the refrigerator. In retrospect, I should have simply left it outside but I was worried that it would go bad given Chennai's humid climate. I ultimately wound up leaving it outside for about 1.5 days and the rest of the days in the fridge.

On D-day, putting the cake together took longer than I expected (so, what's new). Here's what I did, bullet-point style:

1. I assembled all the ingredients first before starting any mixing.
2. The right time to add water to the caramel is when the sugar/water mixture melts completely and then begins to foam/bubble up. The original writer is right, there IS a lot of splashing, so be very careful.
3. I had no powdered spices other than nutmeg. So I simply ground whole cardamom, cloves and cinnamon and sieved it with a tea-strainer before using. Nutmeg is a must for the fruit-cakey taste.
4. I had no dry ginger powder either. So I ground fresh ginger along with the orange juice for the last step and strained and used the ginger-orange juice instead.
5. I don't have an electric mixer and I got a very good arm workout with the hand mixer and plain old hand whisking.
6. One mistake I made was to use fresh lemon peel in the soaked fruit-nut mixture. This peel refused to soften and showed up as weird unchewable bits in the cake. As Mom said, this was the drishti for the otherwise absolutely yummy and professional tasting cake. You could use candied lemon/orange peels if you want to - I think that should be fine.
7. This recipe makes 2 generous-sized cakes (with 8" round pans). The cakes are loaded with fruits and nuts in every bite when made as per the original directions.
8. In case you are wondering, it is impossible to taste/smell the brandy in the finished product. So don't worry if you don't like the alcohol taste.
9. Baking the cake took longer than 45 minutes (closer to an hour perhaps) for me. So keep checking for done-ness every few minutes from the 45 minute-mark.
10. This blog has some more pictures for the same recipe:
http://yummyoyummy.blogspot.com/2010/06/fruit-cake.html

The cake tastes best when cooled. This recipe is a sure keeper. All the effort is totally worth it.

Hot milk sponge cake

Who would have thought making yummy-tasting sponge cake would be so easy? I used to think all along that McRennett made the best sponge cake in the world. I only now realize that this could be because I have only tasted sponge cakes from McRennet. Haha!

Not to take anything from McRennett (seriously, I really love their sponge cakes) but the following recipe made sponge cake which was pretty close in taste and texture to the McRennett stuff. I got the recipe from an old recipe book no longer available (General Foods Kitchen, All About Baking) bought at the library's used book sale. So, no online link. Instead here is the entire recipe:

Slices of sponge cake

Ingredients

2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 eggs unbeaten
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla (or 1 tablespoon grated orange rind)
1 cup milk
2 tablespoons butter or margarine

Method

Sift flour, baking powder and salt together. Beat eggs in a large deep bowl until very thick and light (about 5 minutes). Gradually beat in sugar. Add vanilla. add flour to egg mixture, a small amount at a time, blending by hand or at low speed of electric mixer. Bring milk and butter just to a boil. Very quickly stir into the flour mixture, blending thoroughly (batter will be thin). Pour quickly into a baking pan which has been greased and floured on the bottom only. Bake at once in a moderate oven (350 F) for 30 to 35 minutes. Serve warm.
 

I reduced the sugar (I like milder sweetness) plus had to bake for longer than specified - use the toothpick comes out clean when inserted through the center method of testing for done-ness. Other than that, the only other problem with this recipe is, you will have to halve or quarter it and bake. Because, once you start eating, you will not be able to stop and I don't want to be responsible for you feeling guilty about meeting the calorie requirements for a week on a single day :-D.

Spicy egg masala / kurma

This is a very recent find. I wanted a change from the usual egg kurma recipes with coconut et al. and found this one:

http://mydhaba.blogspot.com/2005/12/spicy-egg-masala.html

Everyone who tasted it raved about it. Totally a keeper.