FFWD Catch-Up: Quiche and Batons

Paul has been hard at work on our garden this year.  The great news is that the combination of his hard work (I helped at least once!), some starter plants from Home Depot, and the unseasonably warm weather mean that we already have lots of romaine and red leaf lettuce, spinach, arugula, mustard greens, and radishes.  The bad news is that it's all ready at exactly the same time.  So, all of our meals for the last couple of weeks and the foreseeable future are very heavy on the greens.

I  really want to make as many of the recipes in the book as I can, and I'm so impressed by people who find guest-posters when the recipe is something they don't eat, but I've decided to give myself a pass on recipes that are mushroom or red meat based.  I don't have anything against either ingredient, but despite my recent attempts at learning to like mushrooms I've just never really enjoyed them, and my parents stopped eating red meat before I was born so I've just never eaten it.  So anyway, I decided that instead of making the navarin printanier this week, I would just catch up on a couple of recipes I missed.

I used up several arugula plants in making the Spinach and Bacon quiche.  Other than substituting arugula for the spinach and using turkey bacon, I followed this recipe exactly.  I made the crust and blanched the arugula on Sunday, and the rest was very easy to put together during the week.  The quiche came out beautifully and we both really enjoyed it.

My only complaint - and I've said this before - is that I wish there was more filling.  I just love eggs and custard, and this felt like more of a tart to me than a true quiche.  I think I just need to accept that this is how Dorie's quiches are, though.  Maybe I'll add some extra egg and cream the next time.  On the side, we had salad (used up some red leaf lettuce) with smoked trout (one of my favorites!) and some pickled radishes that I made over the weekend.  The pickled radishes aren't my favorite, but they are very pretty and a good use of radishes, and a relatively quick weekend canning project.

On Sunday I also prepared and froze the Mustard Batons, which I baked off for dinner later this week.  These were excellent.  I may be biased - mustard is one of my absolute favorite foods - but I loved the flavor.  It also gave me an excuse to use up some of the fancy Walnut Mustard I bought on Open Sky (I follow Dorie there, Paul complains that all of our money is going there...).  I'll definitely be using these as an appetizer for future dinner parties.  They're delicious, pretty, and I love anything that can be made ahead of time.  

This was a bit of a clean-out-the-fridge dinner, but I served the batons with some cheeses I needed to use up and a Cooking Light grilled salad (used a whole head of romaine!).  The salad had tomatoes, blue cheese, turkey bacon, and croutons, but for some reason it wasn't my favorite.  I was up for trying grilled lettuce, but definitely think I prefer my lettuce uncooked, although I'd be very happy to be persuaded otherwise if anybody has any favorite lettuce recipes.  We have so much more lettuce to use up!