Tag Archives: quiche

The Brain Cells v Old Age

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Ham, cheese, mushroom, spring onions

Yesterday, whilst writing the blog post, I had three ideas for prose sections to haibun/tanka prose poems. In my mind, though I am probably wrong, the two things are interchangeable.

Anyway, with three ideas in my head, I thrashed along through the blog post, added photos and tags and a title and sent it on its way into a world of pixels.

At that point I realised I had only two ideas in my head so I immediately set to, wrote one and hoped the elusive third idea would come back. It didn’t. Instead, I forgot the other one.

Three ideas. Two forgotten. One remembered. I really must remember to use a notebook.

And so I made my way to the kitchen. I did not, if I’m honest, fancy the cleaning, so I didn’t do a soda bread, just a couple of quiches, a rice pudding and yellow split pea soup. The quiches involved ready-made cases (mine always do) so it was just a case of filling them. One is Stilton and Leek. We had that last time too, but we do have quite a lot of Stilton left. The other is ham, mushroom, cheese and spring onion. As regular readers will by now have realised, it was filled with what I had knocking round in the fridge.

Stilton and Leek. Stilton does not photograph well.

The yellow split pea soup is ana amalgamation of several recipes as there are some very strange recipes out there for what is essentially a bowl of cheap peasant food. Mine has celery, carrot, sweet potato and spring onion in it along with the peas. It would have been carrot, onion and celery, but it’s another of those leftovers things. I could have started a new carrot and a new onion, but I have wilting spring onions and half a sweet potato left so what am I to do?

Later, I will move on from this very plain version to something slightly more fancy. Perhaps. If it’s OK I will stick with this version. It takes a bit longer than usual because the peas need around an hour to cook down, so I will have to see if it is worth it. Otherwise it’s back to red lentils.

Latest news – the timer went off and I got to the kitchen just in time. The soup was very thick and the water was gone, but I got to it just before it started to burn. I have mashed it so far and it seems OK, though will probably need diluting as it’s more of a thin porridge than a thick soup. I don’t think it needs the hand blender as that will take the texture and the orange speckles out of it.

The rice pudding meanwhile, a slightly fine-tuned recipe, is done too.  All that needs doing now is for Julia to come home, congratulate me on my industry, compliment me on my cooking skills and enjoy a yellow pea soup lunch. Tonight we have the pasta bake and tomorrow we start the quiche and salad lunches.

Veg for the soup

The only fly in the ointment (an expression which, Wikipedia tells me, comes from the Bible) is hat I have to finish cleaning the kitchen before she gets back. Then I have to do some of the actual writing I was planning. So far I have written what is going to be the second post of the day (I will have to do something else for tomorrow) and one part of a poem. It’s a start, but a poor one, and I need to do better.

Yellow split pea soup, or porridge. It needs more water.

Would Larkin call it Quiche?

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Swings and Roundabouts, what goes around comes around, as one door closes another door opens . . .

Hot on the heels of my last rejection comes an acceptance. Not only an acceptance, but an acceptance for two tanka prose. Any double acceptance is a red letter day, as I said recently. This one was particularly good, as I had only sent two.

This is when I noticed something strange. The three that had been rejected a couple of days ago, looked poor when they were returned. The two that were accepted looked good when I re-read them. When I sent them off, they all seemed to be much the same level. It looks like I evaluate my work in relation to what happens when it is judged by an editor.

I must guard against this effect when viewing my work.

Here is a haibun that was rejected many times (four, I think) but accepted within hours by the final editor. It changed a few times over its life but the final version was not, as I recall, changed from the version that had been rejected by the previous editor.

Hidden Worlds

He wears a grey gaberdine and rides a bicycle from church to church. In his head he composes poems about sex and tombs. On YouTube he flickers in black and white, like a newsreel from the 1950s. Smiles are clearly still on ration.

Larkin used more bad language than you normally expect from a librarian. This becomes understandable when you find that he started his day with half a bottle of sherry.

monochrome photo
my parents younger than me
1963

Inspired by the life of Philip Larkin

(Published in Failed Haiku – February 2021)

I added the footnote because I had just been rejected by an editor for being obscure( it was a poem about a visit to Adlestrop). The editor who accepted it, did not use the footnote. You might want to read this, if you aren’t familiar with Larkin. I selected 1963 partly because of the poem and partly because of the sound. It wasn’t an easy decision because the rhyme counts against it in Japanese style poetry.

Meanwhile here are some pictures of my latest quiches, complete with ready made pastry cases. When I was a boy quiches were called flans and my mother used to make “egg and bacon pie”, which has been replaced by Quiche Lorraine. Haven’t we changed over the years? Change and improvement, that old thing.

The top picture is what happened to the leftover egg from the quiches. We just ate it for breakfast. The other pictures are quiches with a definite yellow cast to the photo and a couple of pics of the great biscuit disaster. I only had two cutters – the little man and a glass from the cupboard.

There is a lot of spinach in the flans, though you can’t really see it. We’ve also had it in curry this week. It’s going to mess my INR results up but I ordered a 500g bag with the groceries, which is a lot more spinach than it sounds when you actually have to use it. Green vegetables contain Vitamin K, which is the antidote for Warfarin so if you eat more, the INR goes down. You are supposed to eat the same things each week to stop the INR moving. So the choice is this – die of a blood clot, die of boredom, get scurvy. Discuss.

Mushrooms, books and cookery

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It was a day for firsts yesterday (yes, I’ve slipped another day – fell asleep writing and decided to take the hint). It was the first time I’ve “planted” mushrooms, first time I’ve used chive flowers in a quiche, maybe even the first time I’ve admitted cooking quiche (I’ll have to look back and check that). And it was the first time I was able to be really critical in a book review.

The quiche thing sort of crept up on me, as I’m definitely of the Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche school of cookery.

Anyway – first the mushrooms. I bought two sorts of mushroom spawn – one for grey oyster mushrooms because they are supposed to be easy to grow and one for blewits  because they are a local delicacy. We will see.

I’m growing them on paperback books. The Art of Captaincy by Mike Brearley. I bought it on the basis that it was supposed to be about the psychology of leadership but it turned out to be about making decisions based on the amount of grass on a wicket. I’m sure it’s a great book for a cricket captain, but overall I was disappointed. I bought it cheap in a sale because it had a damaged cover so it seemed a good way to recycle it.

Port Mortuary by Patricia Cornwell was a mistake. I’ve given up reading her novels because I want puzzles and whodunnits not super-successful wooden characters and… Well if you like them you won’t read further and if you don’t like them you will know what I mean.  Growing mushrooms seemed a more fitting end than passing it on and perpetuating the series.

You soak the books in water, spread the spawn on pages about 50 pages apart and hold them together with elastic bands, Easier said than done with wet books and escaping mushroom spawn, I can tell you. They suggest 400 pages, so The Art of Captaincy was a bit short, though it hadn’t seemed like it when I read it. They are now bagged up and incubating in my desk drawer and will be refrigerated later. Ironic when you think about the way Scarpetta’s clients end up.  I will keep you in touch.

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The quiche was more of an immediate project – done in about 45 minutes from picking the herbs. We had smoked salmon left over from the weekend sandwich making so I bought two pastry cases, added torn up chive blossom, chopped fennel leaves and a splash of nutmeg and that was basically it. Four eggs and 300 ml of milk wasn’t quite enough for the filling but it was adequate. I will make a note next time. cook for 30 minutes at about 180 C in a fan oven.

I wanted to see if there was a way of ensuring a good decorative effect so I tried two methods of filling – one laying the chive blossom and fennel on the salmon and pouring  the egg mix on top.  In the second I mixed them in the egg and milk and poured it all in.

Results? No real difference. The salmon and fennel showed up OK but the chive flowers seemed to disappear.

Taste. Three tasters in total – two were happy and I thought the smoked salmon made it just a bit too salty. Seems to be a success, and as the salmon, chives and fennel were free it was quite economical. Picture below is a guide to quantities – I never remember to weigh and make notes.

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