Beets Beeter Beetest

I love beets. Mr. Lemon does not. So when beets crop up in the CSA line up (a little agri-humor for you), I get excited, but know that there's a dinner challenge ahead. Hearts and stomachs must be won over with some creativity:

Beet this.

What's great is that in one lovely fresh bunch of beets you've got two veggies with two different flavors. So off come the tops to become the centerpiece of a quiche and into the oven the pretty magenta roots go for an hour of roasting to make them soft and sweet.

I've made quiche before with swiss chard and liked how the creaminess of egg and the nutmeg worked out the kinks of a bitter green. So the beet greens were an experiment. Also an experiment? A potato crust. I've wanted to try one of these out for a while and I would definitely make it again. While I am quite familiar with my rolling pin, sometimes make a pastry crust seems a little fussy to me. And with the potatoes, there's starch for sure, but not the fattiness of a full butter crust.

And as it turned out, this us an unbeetable combo for a healthy, but filling veggie dinner.

Potato Crusted Beet Green Quiche

4-5 red potatoes, medium, peeled and grated

2-3 Tablespoons olive oil

1 bunch beet greens (tops), washed and rough chopped

3 cloves garlic, grated

1 leek, sliced thin and soak to get out any grit

4 eggs, beaten

1 cup low fat milk

freshly grated nutmeg

salt and pepper

Heat oven to 425F. Grate 4-5 medium sized peeled red potatoes. Mix this with olive oil to coat (about 2 Tablespoons) and add salt and pepper. In a cake pan or tart pan with a solid bottom, brush lightly with olive oil and press the potato mixture into the bottom and up the sides. Mine was pretty thick (about 1/2 inch thick) but I'm betting you could cut down on the potato. Bake for 30 minutes. Mine could probably have gone longer in order to get the "crust" out more neatly. Next time I might also add a little flour or egg to glue the potato together better.

In a saute pan, add a drizzle of olive oil and the beet tops, rinsed thoroughly and chopped into 1 inch pieces. Saute over medium high heat and add 3 cloves of grated garlic. When the greens are wilted and the stems look day glow bright, pull them off the heat and into a bowl or plate to cool. In the same pan add a little more olive oil and add 1 leek, rinsed and sliced into disks. Over medium high heat, these leeks will cook quickly and any brown bits on the bottom will come up and combine with the leeks. Cook until soft and add to the greens.

In a separate bowl, whisk 4 eggs and 1 cup low fat milk. Grate fresh nutmeg (more than you might expect) and some salt and pepper.

Scatter the greens and leeks into the potato crust and pour the egg mixture over it. Pat down any stems that pop up and pop the whole thing in the oven at 350F for 30 minutes until a knife inserted in to the middle comes out clean. Let sit for five minutes then slice and serve!

Meanwhile, there are those lovely pink globes of goodness roasting away...

Roast Beet and Arugula Salad

5-6 beets, tops trimmed

2 cups arugula

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

2 teaspoons red wine vinegar

2 Tablespoons olive oil

Salt and pepper

Trim off the tops and rinse the beets. Wrap each individually in tin foil and put on a baking sheet. Roast these at 425 for 45 minutes, while you're baking the potato crust and then a bit longer while the potato crust is cooling. Let cool in the tin foil and use a paper towel to rub off the skin. Slice and dice and add to a vinaigrette of 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard + 2 teaspoons red wine vinegar and 2 Tablespoons olive oil plus salt and pepper. Serve over arugula.

Quiche Love

I seem to be on a kick: forgiving food. Not food to ask forgiveness, or to forgive others with, but food that actually can stand up to a challenge. Sometimes you need a dish that can go the distance, or at least the length of a buffet without wilting, drying out or going bad. And the answer happens to be one of the easiest and most delicious options around, and did I mention that it's actually pretty thrifty?

Quiche can be made ahead, frozen and reheated, served hot or at room temperature, and can sit out for, well, usually as long as you need it to (I wouldn't go overnight, but...) And then there's the flexibility of ingredients. The basics are some sort of pastry base, some eggs and some milk/cream. Then, you just go wild: vegetables, meats, cheeses.

But even with swapping in skim milk for cream or using fewer eggs, the fact remains that quiche isn't exactly healthy. There's that little problem of, oh, the butter-laden crust and the cheese (and you DO want the cheese.)

So here's the solution: make it small. I like wee food in general, and I actually prefer my quiches mini. Over the winter I'd turned out batch after batch of itsy bitsy quiches that I froze for those "impromptu" guests. (Well, not impromptu so much as coming by when I wouldn't necessarily want to be rushing around before they arrived.) They were perfect as everything from proper cocktails to a starter for brunch.

And this weekend I had the honor of co-hosting an afternoon bridal shower for a dear friend, so another perfect time for my forgiving little friends. But this time I turned out a batch of 3-bite quiche using my handy muffin pan (regular size, not mini!) I filled a flaky crust from Martha with yellow pepper, asparagus and Gruyere; Gruyere, onion and bacon (aka Lorraine), and my personal favorite, leek and parmesan. Good things do come in small packages

Mini Quiche Universal Recipe

I studied up on my quiche recipes in trying to figure out a healthy option that would still taste yummy when shrunk down. And you know what? You can pretty much do what you want with quiche. So this is a universal recipe that swaps in ingredients, but I've also included some suggestions of what I used. And the thrift factor of being able to use what you have can't be beat.

Pastry/Dough

This is from Martha Stewart and you can find her original mini quiche recipe here. I've changed mine to reflect healthier ingredients and different proportions. But Trust In Martha when it comes to pastry. She knows her stuff. This is her Pate Brisee recipe and I follow it to the T:

2 1/2 cups flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

2 sticks unsalted butter, cold and cut into cubes

1/2 cup ice water

In a food processor, combine the flour salt and sugar. Add all the butter and pulse about 10 seconds until the butter is no longer visible. With the machine running pour in the ice water and allow the mixture to come together. This will NOT take long so keep your eyes on the processor. I also hear a different sound because the blade is dealing with a more solid form. Divide the dough into two disks. I usually spread out two large pieces of plastic wrap and dump it onto them directly. Wrap tightly and refrigerate at least one hour. I've kept this stuff for several days in the fridge and it is totally ok.

Roll out on a floured surface and cut circles that are about two times the circumference of the base of your muffin pan. Haha, kidding. Grab a wide mouth glass or jar from your cupboard and play around to see what size circle fits nicely when nestled into a muffin pan, as pan sizes vary. I used a big old plastic cup from my college days that is about 3 1/2 inches across. Grease your muffin tin well and then start fitting the little dough circles into each spot. I often cut out a small wedge to make the dough fit more easily.Half the recipe above made about 15-18 3-bite quiches.

Filling

For 15-18 quiches, you need about 1 cup of filling, and cook anything that is not a soft vegetable (tomatoes can go in raw):

• 1 leek, cut into 1/8 disks and soaked in water to get rid of any grit
• 1/2 pepper, diced + 3 spears asparagus, sliced thin
• 5-6 strips of bacon, cut into 1/4 inch pieces + 1 onion, diced

Cheese

You *want* cheese in your quiche, and you need about 1 cup grated. I love my microplane and it does a great job of creating a fluffy mound of cheese that I can easily distribute into the smaller cups.

Egg Mixture

4 eggs

2 cups milk (I tried 1 % and it worked)

Freshly grated nutmeg (microplane, again, about 1 teaspoon)

A little salt

Put it together: evenly distribute the filling and cheese in the bottom of your dough-filled muffin pan. Pour in the egg mixture until it is even with the top of the pastry.

Bake at 350F for 35 minutes when a knife comes out clean from the center. Let sit about 10 minutes in the pan before removing to finish cooling.

I've used both my silicone pan and my regular old tin. Both work well.

Tally:

Great party food that stands up over time

Thrifty way to use up bits and pieces of vegetables, cheese and meat

Bite-size dishes let guests determine how much they want to indulge

Put leftovers in the freezer and reheat whenever you need a quick nibble or lunch.

Chard-Filled Quiche Cups

Everyone couldn't stop talking about how HOT it's been, and then the sweltering weather stopped. Just like that, yesterday was warm with a breeze, but not so hot that you couldn't walk around, wear something more than a swimsuit, or bake.

I'd recently become a big fan of Muffin Tin Mania, a clever blog devoted to creative cooking with, you guessed it, a muffin tin. But of course, many of the delicious recipes involve turning on the oven--a big no-no in our AC-free apartment. The Swiss Chard Quiche especially called to me, since our CSA drops a pile of chard in our lap each week and eggs are a favorite inexpensive protein around here. And as Matthew at Muffin Tin Mania points out, muffin-sized food is diet-friendly because it's automatic portion-control. Half the size, double the fun. Count me in.

Since it wasn't too hot to bake, I made these quiches last night but subbed in Parmesan since cooked goat cheese usually doesn't agree with my stomach. Along with a German apple wine (on sale), the last of our CSA salad and some cooked carrots with parsley, we gave ourselves a taste of fall on a cool summer night.

Chard Quiche Cups

Adapted from Muffin Tin Mania

5 eggs

1/3 cup 1 % milk

2 cups chard, washed, trimmed of larger stems and chopped

2 Tablespoons basil, cut in a chiffonade

2 Tablespoons Parmesan, grated

Olive Oil

Grease a silicon muffin pan with olive oil. The original recipe recommends silicon pans and I have to second that. These would not have neatly come out of a regular pan.

Place the chard in a bowl of cold water and let the dirt/sediment fall to the bottom. In the meantime, cut basil in a chiffonade, whisk together eggs and milk. Dry and remove the thicker part of the chard stem, then chop into pieces about 1/2-inch squared. Mix the chard, basil and Parmesan with the egg and milk. Salt.

Distribute evenly in greased muffin pan cups. My silicon pan has 6 cups and it worked out perfectly. Bake at 350F for 25 minutes.

The chard and basil offer a nice herby flavor alongside the egg in this easy, satisfying and cute main dish.

Tally:

Chard finds a new and tasty medium

Quiche that's crustless and portion-control friendly

Eggs offer protein at a low price