So in addition to pantry restocking on Sunday, I found some time to make quiche for dinner for the two of us. In retrospect, this wasn't a great idea, since my mom was making quiche for the shower Melissa spent all day at. But Melissa was gamely willing to eat some more, this time a 4 1/2" individual quiche. She's so supportive.

The filling was composed of some chard I had bought last week, but not yet used, and some bacon I bought with the Onslaught of Sausage, which I had also not used. I cut the chard into small squares and fried the bacon, and added the whole kit and caboodle to some egg and cream and milk, to which I added grated Gruyere. Not bad. Not bad at all.

We accompanied the quiche with some slices of the big ciabbata I made, plus the requisite olive oil, lightly salted with chi-chi salt, to dip. And to drink, more wine from our K & L Best Buy club. This time, a 2001 Pinot Blanc from Mission Hill. A Canadian wine. Like the club's buyer, I had only ever had one type of wine from Canada, but oh what a wine! Ice wine is one of my favorite dessert wines. This was most decidedly not a dessert wine, but it was quite yummy. Lots of nectarine/peach on the nose, as well as mango and grapefruit and some lychee. It was not super acidic, lightly bodied and with a medium finish (Melissa said a short finish). This unfortunately meant that it was somewhat overwhelmed by the food, even though the quiche was pretty light, but Melissa pointed out it would be very good as an opener during the spring and summer.

And I ended up with two extra crusts, which are sitting in the freezer, waiting to be filled at some future point. But the best part about making pie dough is the pile of scraps. I could have rolled it out to make at least one more crust (which some say makes for a tougher crust), but I opted for the more common cookies. I rolled out the pastry dough into a rectangle, smeared it with melted butter, sprinkled Vietnamese cinnamon liberally over the surface, and then added a single-file line of crystallized ginger, which ended up smack dab in the middle of the little spiral made by me rolling up the dough. Chop into little rounds, brush 'em with melted butter, sprinkle with sugar, cook with the pie crusts, and you have a splendid little cookie. Which went very nicely with the rice pudding I also made.

And as I was looking at the leftover filling, which had not made it into a pie crust, I had an idea. Savory French toast. So the next day at lunch, I packed a couple slices of my bread and the leftover custard. That I spread on a plate, and then laid a slice of bread in the mixture (I held off on one of the slices so I had a backup). While the bread did a decent job of soaking up the egg and cream, it obviously was not as good at picking up the chard, bacon, and cheese in there. So first I got the George Foreman Grill we have at work nice and hot, and then dropped the egg-soaked bread onto the surface and closed up the little grill. I wanted the egg to start cooking right away and not dribble out of the slanted surface of the GF. Once it was nice and brown, I scooped some of the chard, bacon, and cheese onto the surface and popped it in the toaster oven to brown the cheese.

That was one of my better ideas.

The next day was an open-face sandwich made with more chard, bacon, and cheese, the stuff that didn't even make it into a quiche filling, let alone into a crust. My co-workers have noticed a trend this week.

I shredded the chard, fried the bacon on the grill (which sort of worked), and then julienned the Gruyere I had brought (we don't have a cheese grater at work). I laid the pieces of bread in the toaster oven, and again did my best to brown the cheese.

So clearly I had a lot of chard. And I still have a lot. So to take advantage of it before it all went bad, tonight I made a chard stem, ginger, and shallot relish. I cut the aforementioned ingredients into small dice, and then cooked them in a mixture of vinegar, salt and sugar until they were nice and soft and yummy. But they finished cooking before they absorbed all the liquid in the pot, and I suddenly realized that I had a "quick pickle" brine left over. Well seasoned and already hot, it begged for something to be pickled. Now you might argue that the last thing that should go in a vinegar-based pickling solution is thinly sliced lemon, but that's what I had at hand. I'll be curious to see how they turn out. If nothing else, the pickling liquid will probably taste quite good, but I suspect the lemons themselves will be excruciatingly tart.
posted by Derrick at 10:40 PM

I don't think I'm ever serving a fig-port chutney again. At least not to other people. It causes too much confusion. It caused much consternation with a Muslim friend's boyfriend when I announced it as an ingredient in a stuffed turkey breast I served them, and caused most of the people at my work to try and figure out how exactly you made pork chutney. Urgh.

There's no pork in it, but it turns out to go very nicely with the smoked pork sausages I've been eating throughout the week. For the final meal in Sausage Week, I grilled two sausages, served them atop toasted pain de mie (it's amazing how long that stuff keeps, well wrapped in saran wrap), and spooned reheated fig-port chutney over them. Tres yummy.

The other big task here at Eating Well Cheaply was pantry restocking. Quite literally. While Melissa went off to a bridal shower in her honor, I made fumet with frozen fish parts and started a beef stock. This time, I tried roasting the oxtail for a while as opposed to browning them on the stovetop, and the stock is already quite deeply flavored, a mere four hours into its pot-borne life. In addition to the oxtails I bought, I pulled out some scraps of strip steak I had from a dinner party last month, the little ends and gristle which I had trimmed before cooking them. Those I browned in the stock pot for a few minutes rather than leaving them in the roasting pan for two hours with the bones. And I am definitely trying the oxtail reuse trick, in which the oxtails are cooked into a new stock, which is then reduced until hell freezes over and turned into a glace de viande, the ultra dense flavoring agent. As my friend Tom pointed out, it's two items for the price of one, which is always a good thing.

The fumet (which also got rid of some white wine we had in the fridge) came out fairly nicely, though there's a pronounced acidity before the fish flavor comes in strong on the finish.

I also prepped some more salted lemons. There's a month waiting time before they're ready, but my original ones are so yummy that I want to make sure I have more when the old ones run out.

The other big pantry ingredient on today's agenda is bread, a big slab of ciabatta from my revived sourdough starter. It's been a while since I had a big rustic loaf to reuse over the week, so I'm looking forward to it.

Finally, I'm hoping to get puff pastry made today, but the kitchen is very warm what with the stocks pumping steam into the room, and the oven cranked up for the bread, so it might have to wait. It's much tougher to get it made correctly when the butter's beginning to melt on you.
posted by Derrick at 4:15 PM