One of my favorite dishes is quiche, yet for some reason we rarely make it! Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time studying for a big upcoming exam – so in order to procrastinate more effectively, I decided to spend a few hours making quiche…crust from scratch and everything. I picked up some zucchini at a local farm stand, and was inspired to find some other ingredients that went with zucchini well. I used a variety of recipes for inspiration – although this one does not have a crust, it did have a great combination of veggies and flavors. My husband usually protests if we have too much vegetarian food, so I threw in a bit of sweet italian sausage for him – but I imagine this would taste great without it. I made a pastry crust from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I tweaked the amount of eggs included and the cheese a bit, as I didn’t have any monterey jack on hand. The quiche was great…and hopefully I’ll still pass my big exam!

Zucchini and Sausage Quiche

Crust Ingredients:

5 oz flour (1 and 1/8 cups)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1 stick butter, cut into pieces

3 tablespoons ice water

Filling Ingredients:

2 medium zucchini, sliced thinly

1 medium onion, sliced thinly

2 cloves garlic

2 links of sweet italian sausage

5 eggs

1/2 tsp dried basil and dried marjoram

1/2 cup parmesan cheese

1/2 cup mild cheddar cheese

To make the crust – Preheat oven to 425. place the flour, sugar, and salt into a food processor and pulse to combine. Add the cut-up butter to the dry ingredients and pulse repeatedly until the butter and flour is well combined – it will look a little like cornmeal. Place this in a bowl and sprinkle water over the flour/butter combination and then combine to form a ball. Chill the ball (wrapped in saran wrap) in the freezer for 10 minutes. Dust the chilled dough with flour and place the chilled dough between two layers of saran wrap. If it becomes too soft, chill again! Put the crust into a pie plate and pierce all over – cover with foil and fill with pie weights (or dried beans – cheaper!) and bake at 425 degrees for 12 minutes.

To make the filling – Set oven for 325 degrees. Saute the zucchini, onion and garlic in a medium skillet until softened, then put aside. Remove the sausage casing and brown the meat until no longer pink at all. In a bowl, beat 5 eggs together with the marjoram, basil and parmesan cheese until combined. Stir in the zucchini/onion mix, cheddar cheese and sausage. Place the mixture in the prepared pie crust. Bake at 325 degrees for 30-40 minutes – until the center is set. Enjoy!

Tags: Quiche

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Entrees, Side Dishes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.