Foody Friday: quiche galore

The more I make quiche, the more I love just how versatile it is. It's a breakfast equivalent of nasi goreng (fried rice) in the sense that you can throw in whatever's available at the moment, you know, finish off leftovers and such. I also recently tried a targeted quiche, i.e. trying to actually replicate a certain taste/combination.

Here's a list of my recent quiche permutations:

• Leftover slow-cooked Catalina Cranberry Chicken (a recipe from mochamomma) with spinach and other veggies. This was particularly hearty and tasty: having flavorful chicken really helps pull it all together!
• Spinach, artichoke & diced tomatoes with habañeros. This was my first try ever at artichokes. I used the canned variety. I knew it would complement the spinach. I made mega-cheesy because this was for the potluck end-of-semester "party" for my massage course. It was a hit.
• Spinach, artichoke & orange peppers. I felt bad because Kosh had missed out on the goodness of the previous quiche, so I made this one for him :) I'd only used half of the canned artichoke (kinda on purpose), and while I was out of diced tomatoes, the peppers worked just as well. I eased up on using an entire bag of shredded cheese tho, LoL!
• Spinach, orange peppers, onions & hot giardiniera relish. I was still in a quiche mood (hey let's face it, it's real easy to make, it's really hard to ruin, and I love love love eggy breakfast-type dishes!), so this was a more 'normal' quiche, i.e. throwing together what I happened to have on hand. Yes, my quiches tend to be vegetarian.
• Philly Cheesesteak Quiche. My massage classmate speculated about making one of these, so I surprised her with one for her birthday. I'll expand on it below.
• Crustless veggie quiche. After a few weeks off (I *did* get tired of quiche after a while, LoL!), and after deciding I needed to cut some unnecessary refined carbs (i.e. the crust) out of my diet, I tried my hand at a crustless quiche. I also used a whole lot more egg whites than I did whole eggs. It turned out fine, but looked a bit ...small... and the crust really did lend a nice touch to the overall taste and composition, so in this case something was missing... I'll have to experiment a little bit more with this, and also figure out the difference between this and a fritata :)

Okay... so now... let's delve a bit into the Philly Cheesesteak Quiche, shall we?

I found this recipe, and totally tweaked it :)

I started by attempting to carmelize half a white onion, sliced. Ended up just kinda burning the heck out of the onion instead :p Made that the first layer, followed by thinly sliced green peppers, and the drained contents of a small can of mushrooms. For the beef, I used two portions of what I found at Walmart. I kinda burned the things too, and had difficulty getting them to separate out into individual strips. Oops!


In the photo above you see the layers of onion, peppers, 'shrooms, beef *and* some philly cream cheese that I decided would add something unique to the dish.



When researching this dish, I found out that Philly Cheesesteak sammiches are made with provolone cheese. Well, either that or Cheese Whiz (is that the stuff that comes in a "spray can" like whipped cream?) (ugh!), it seems. So I found some sliced sharp/strong provolone, cut 'em into strips, and that made another layer.



Then I remembered I'd intended to add some shredded cheddar cheese BEFORE the sliced cheese. Oh well. So that went on top. Then in went the egg and half-and-half combo, and the dish was popped into the oven (350F) for 45 mins.

It came out looking just like any other quiche...
... and this is how it was delivered to the birthday girl.

I was really anxious about not only giving away a total experiment (which included kinda burned onions *and* beef!), but giving it away as someone's birthday present to boot! Thankfully she said it was good, and that everyone who had a slice gave rave reviews (she only got to eat perhaps a sixth of the dish, because of those other mouths, poor thing!).

I still have two portions of the frozen philly-style steaks: whether I do another round of PCS quiche, or try to fix an actual Philly cheesesteak sammich for Kosh & myself, we'll have to see... in the meantime, if you try your hand at your own Philly Cheesesteak Quiche, do drop by and tell me about it, k?

Have a great weekend!