A green quiche
Ingredients
filling:
400 g rainbow chard
6 eggs
1/2 block feta
1/2 T cooking oil
1 red onion
3-4 spring onions
2 cloves garlic
nutmeg
1/2 t dried oregano
salt and pepper
wholemeal pastry (if using):
250 g flour
125 g butter
ice water
Method
A note: you don’t have to use pastry for a quiche. If you prefer, you can omit altogether. Just make sure you grease your mold well, or line with baking paper to ensure easy removal.
For the pastry: Either using your hands or doing a food processor, combine flour and water until it is the consistency of breadcrumbs. Then add water little by little until small circles of dough begins to form. Work a few times with your hands to get a smooth pastry. Then cover and refrigerate for at least 20 minutes.
Cook the pastry: Pre-heat oven to 180°C. Once pastry is chilled, roll out with a little flour to prevent sticking. Use paper to line a tart mold, then carefully lift pastry into the mold. Add another sheet of paper and then add baking weights (or beans or rice). Pre-cook quiche shell in the oven for 10 minutes.
For the filling: Slice onion and cook in a frying pan on a low heat with a little cooking oil. After 5 minutes, add spring onions and garlic. Continue to cook for a further 2-3 minutes until spring onions are wilted. Set aside.
Rinse your chard well and chop off any tough ends (but more tender ends should be sliced up and added to the pan). Then roughly chop and cook in a large pan until it wilts right down and releases most of its liquid. You may need to do this in batches.
Chop feta and whisk together in a large bowl with eggs, dried oregano, nutmeg and salt and pepper. Then add the chard and onion mix to complete your filling.
Cooking the quiche: Spoon filling into the quiche shell and cook for around 30 minutes at 170°C, or until cooked through.
Serve: Serve warm or cold with a salad. Think for instance of a greek salad that balances all the green in the quiche (and uses the other half of that block of feta).
The story behind the recipe…
Some days it feels like you started off on a wrong-foot and never managed to right it. You were slow to get up, grumped through breakfast, the cycle to work felt a chore instead of its usual uplifting communal feeling that you love of we’re all on the road together merrily cycling along, you slogged through the day and got home and still you hadn’t managed to shake that feeling.
You open the fridge and it is empty except for a bag of rainbow chard and half a block of feta. There are eggs. This is enough for dinner, it will have to be enough. You start to cook. You make the pastry. You put it in the fridge to chill. You always rush this step because making pastry from scratch takes ages. Most of the time the pastry turns out just fine, even when you rush it.
As you cook, as your hands chop the onion, as tears predictably well up in your eyes, as the oven steams up your tiny kitchen, as the rainbow chard lies cheerily in its pan, with its yellow and pink and orange stems, for no obvious reason, your mood begins to dissipate, until you are back to yourself again and everything is fine, as it will be tomorrow and as it was yesterday.
It is just you in the kitchen. This time is for you. That is what makes it sacred. This is the place you choose to be right in this moment. This is the food you choose to cook. And it is all okay.
Rainbow chard is a summer vegetable, sure, but it has one of those long seasons that mean that a generous crop will stick around well into winter as long as the slugs stay away. When I had an allotment, I grew rainbow chard every year, and every year it was one of the first things I started to harvest, baby leaves tender and colourful, and one of the last, after I’d saved the basil seeds and the sweet pea pods, the curved marigold seeds. Long after the last tomato had been picked, the others already starting to go mushy with the rain and the damp of a typical Dutch summer. This was a few years ago, you understand, not this year of drought and heatwaves, this year, there has been no rain. I would cycle to the allotment and bring back supermarket bags full of rainbow chard, peeling off any stray slugs and rinsing off the mud. Making quiches and adding it to curries and soups.
This week’s recipe is simple but delicious. It gives you a healthy dose of greens and almost all of us need more of those in our diets.
Thanks so much for reading, as always.
Amelia.